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Perusing the jazz section at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, artist Kye Potter found a worn cassette by American pianist Jessica Williams. It seemed like the classic independent effort. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he says. "It was personally duplicated, with photocopied notes, a little bit of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector particularly interested in the American musical avant garde post John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed unusual from Williams, who was best known for creating lively jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a musical experimenter – for her concerts, she required pianos lacking the lid to facilitate to reach inside and play the strings directly – it was a aspect that seldom found its way on her albums.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to ask if additional recordings had been made. She provided four recordings of prepared piano from the 1980s – two live, two studio creations. Although she had long since retired previously, she also enclosed some recent work. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – entire projects," Potter recounts.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams in the pandemic era to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was released in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter says. Williams had been vocal concerning her difficulties following spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "However, I believe her character, fortitude, assurance and the calmness she found through having a spiritual practice all were evident in conversation."

In her subsequent electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – explicitly categorized "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a pianist seeking to transcend convention. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano resonances, demonstrates that that desire reached back decades. Rather than a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates a multitude of sonic associations: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, remote carillons, animals rattling around cages, and small devices spluttering into life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with colossal bellows dissolving into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Listener Praise

Musician Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the power of her music, but knew little of her otherworldly prepared piano prior to this release. Shortly after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Now that seems completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Historical Influences

Her altered piano techniques have historical forerunners: consider John Cage’s modified instruments, or the groundbreaking approaches of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how effectively she merges these new sounds with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The stylistic approach rarely departs from that which she cultivated in a body of work spanning more than 80 albums, meaning the new trippily tinted sounds are fueled by the bubbling vitality of an improviser in full control. That's thrilling stuff.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Throughout her life, Williams tinkered with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she once explained. She obtained her first vertical piano in 1954. On her blog, she recounted the tale of her first "taking apart" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she noted: Williams removed a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor beside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she stated.

Initially, Williams learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for embellishing a section. But he saw her potential: the following week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

In time, Brubeck call Williams "one of the greatest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was just as awed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, displays her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Yet, despite her extensive studies to educate herself the genre – first, to the more modern styles of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before moving backwards to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she soon grew disillusioned with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "boys’ club," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of getting gigs – and of a commercial business profiting from the work of financially strained musicians.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she wrote in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, honest, openly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a transgender woman. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her chosen artistic field for a period, imagine what kind of terrible treatment she must have endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Her professional path evolved into self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling in Portland in 1991, and later going to a more remote location, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the great promise of the internet