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Perusing the jazz section at a local record store a few years ago, collector Kye Potter discovered a battered tape by American pianist Jessica Williams. It appeared like the classic independent effort. "The labels had come off the tape," he recalls. "It was personally duplicated, with photocopied notes, a little bit of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector particularly interested in the American musical avant garde after John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt out of character for Williams, who was best known for making vibrant jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the West Coast scene knew her as a musical experimenter – during her performances, she requested pianos without the cover to allow her to get inside and pluck the strings – it was a dimension that infrequently appeared on her releases.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to see if further recordings were available. She provided four recordings of prepared piano from the mid-80s – two concert recordings, two studio creations. Even though she had ceased playing publicly previously, she also included some recent work. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synth tapes – entire projects," says Potter.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams during the Covid pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was published in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, during the project. She was 73. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter says. Williams had been vocal concerning her struggles following spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "However, I believe her character, fortitude, assurance and the peace she found through her spiritual pursuits all shone through 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 attempting to transcend expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano echoes, reveals that that desire extended back decades. In place of a homogenous piano sound, the piano creates a multitude of sonic associations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, remote carillons, creatures in enclosures, and small devices spluttering into life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with monumental roars dissolving into biting, staccato riffs.

Critical Acclaim

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

Technical Precursors

Her altered piano techniques have historical forerunners: think of John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the innovative methods of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how successfully she blends these new sounds with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The stylistic approach rarely departs from that which she developed in a catalog extending to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are driven by the fizzy energy of an artist in full control. It’s thrilling stuff.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams had always experimented with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she noted in an interview. She was given her first home piano in 1954. On her blog, she told the story of her first "taking apart" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she noted: Williams detached a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor beside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she explained.

Williams originally trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for embellishing a section. But he saw her potential: the next week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

Subsequently, Brubeck call Williams "one of the greatest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was equally admiring. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, displays her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her extensive studies to learn about the genre – first, to the more modern styles of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before working her way back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she rapidly felt disenchanted with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "old boys' network," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of securing work – and of a corporate industry profiting from the work of artists in need.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she wrote in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, direct, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans woman. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her desired musical domain for a period, imagine what kind of inhumane bullshit she must have suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

Forging an Autonomous Career

Williams’ career moved toward self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the active Bay Area scene, she relocated to smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, moving to Portland in 1991, and later going to a more remote location, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams saw early on the huge potential of the internet