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While browsing the jazz section at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, artist Kye Potter found a battered tape by musician Jessica Williams. It appeared like the classic independent effort. "The labels had detached from the tape," he notes. "It was home-dubbed, with photocopied notes, a little bit of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector deeply fascinated by the American musical avant garde post John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt atypical for Williams, who was primarily recognized for producing vibrant jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the West Coast scene knew her as a creative innovator – for her concerts, she required pianos lacking the lid to facilitate to access the interior and pluck the strings – it was a facet that rarely made it on her albums.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to ask if additional recordings existed. She sent back four recordings of prepared piano from the mid-80s – two live, two made in the studio. Although she had stepped away from public performance some time before, she also shared some contemporary pieces. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – entire projects," says Potter.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams throughout the pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was released in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, midway through the project. She was 73. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter says. Williams had been open regarding her hardships after spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "But I think her personality, strength, self-confidence and the peace she found through her spiritual pursuits all shone through in conversation."

Within her more recent electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – defiantly tagged "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a musician trying to break free of convention. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano resonances, demonstrates that that desire extended back decades. Instead of a homogenous piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic associations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, remote carillons, creatures in enclosures, and small devices coughing to start. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with colossal bellows dissolving into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Guitarist Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the force of her music, but knew little of her otherworldly prepared piano until this release. Not long after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Today, that appears completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Historical Influences

These modified tones have artistic antecedents: think of John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the innovative methods of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how masterfully she fuses these novel textures with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The language scarcely deviates from that which she cultivated in a body of work extending to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new trippily tinted sounds are driven by the effervescent force of an improviser in complete command. This is thrilling stuff.

A Constant Innovator

Williams had always 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 shared the anecdote of her first "dismantling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she commented: Williams took off a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor next to her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she stated.

Initially, Williams trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for altering a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the next week, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Brubeck would later refer to Williams "a top-tier 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 knowledge of jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Yet, despite her dedicated efforts to educate herself the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before moving backwards to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she soon grew disappointed with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of securing work – and of a commercial business riding on the coattails of artists in need.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she stated in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was eclectic, direct, expressly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a transgender woman. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her preferred musical arena for a period, imagine what kind of terrible treatment she must have suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

The artist's trajectory arced towards self-sufficiency. Following a period in the active Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, making a home in Portland in 1991, and later moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams understood from the beginning the huge potential of the internet