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Perusing the jazz records at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, collector Kye Potter found a battered tape by American pianist Jessica Williams. It looked like the classic independent effort. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he says. "It was copied at home, with xeroxed liners, a dab of fluorescent marker to emphasize the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector deeply fascinated by the avant-garde movement after John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed atypical for Williams, who was best known for producing sparkling jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the West Coast scene knew her as a creative innovator – at her live shows, she requested pianos with the top removed to make it easier to reach inside and strum the strings – it was a aspect that rarely made it on her records.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to ask if additional recordings were available. She provided four recordings of prepared piano from the 1980s – two performance tapes, two made in the studio. Even though she had long since retired years earlier, she also enclosed some contemporary pieces. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – entire projects," says Potter.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered 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, part way through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter reveals. Williams had been open regarding her hardships following spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "Yet I feel her personality, strength, self-confidence and the serenity she found through her spiritual pursuits all shone through in conversation."

In later electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – boldly labeled "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a pianist trying to break free of convention. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano resonances, reveals that that impulse stretched back decades. In place of a uniform piano sound, the piano creates numerous distinct sonic associations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, remote carillons, creatures in enclosures, and tiny engines spluttering into life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with massive roars giving way to snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Musician Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the intensity of her music, but had scant knowledge of her dreamlike prepared piano prior to this release. Soon after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Historical Influences

Williams’ prepared sounds have technical precursors: think of John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the innovative methods of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how successfully she blends these new sounds with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. Her musical speech hardly ever strays from that which she honed in a discography stretching to more than 80 albums, so that the new trippily tinted sounds are driven by the fizzy energy of an improviser in total mastery. That's exhilarating material.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams consistently experimented with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she once explained. She was given her first home piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she recounted the tale of her first "taking apart" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she wrote: Williams detached a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor next to her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she stated.

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

Frustration with the Scene

Brubeck would later describe Williams "a top-tier pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was similarly impressed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, shows her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Yet, despite her dedicated efforts to learn about the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before working her way back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she quickly became disillusioned with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of getting gigs – and of a corporate industry riding on the coattails of financially strained musicians.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of core values," she stated in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was eclectic, direct, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans individual. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that chased 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."

Forging an Autonomous Career

Williams’ career arced towards self-sufficiency. Following a period in the active Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, moving to Portland in 1991, and later relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the immense possibilities of the internet