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Flipping through the jazz aisle at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, artist Kye Potter found a well-used recording by musician Jessica Williams. It appeared like the classic independent effort. "The labels had come off the tape," he says. "It was home-dubbed, with photocopied notes, a little bit of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector keenly focused on the U.S. experimental scene after John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed out of character for Williams, who was most famous for making lively jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the California jazz community knew her as a musical experimenter – for her concerts, she requested pianos with the top removed to facilitate to reach inside and strum the strings – it was a dimension that infrequently appeared on her albums.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to see if further recordings were available. She sent back four recordings of prepared piano from the 1980s – two concert recordings, two studio creations. And though she had stepped away from public performance some time before, she also shared some newer material. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – complete albums," Potter explains.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams in the pandemic era to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was issued in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter reveals. Williams had been vocal concerning her struggles following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "However, I believe her personality, strength, self-confidence and the peace she found through having a spiritual practice all came out in conversation."

In her subsequent 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 artist attempting to transcend tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano resonances, shows that that desire stretched back decades. In place of a consistent piano sound, the instrument creates a multitude of sonic associations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, distant church bells, animals rattling around cages, and small devices coughing to start. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with colossal bellows collapsing into biting, staccato riffs.

Listener Praise

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the force of her music, but had scant knowledge of her surreal-sounding prepared piano until this release. Soon after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Today, that appears completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Technical Precursors

These modified tones have technical precursors: reflect on John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the groundbreaking approaches of American eccentric Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how effectively she fuses these innovative timbres with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. Her musical speech hardly ever strays from that which she developed in a body of work stretching to more than 80 albums, meaning the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are driven by the fizzy energy of an artist in total mastery. That's exhilarating material.

A Constant Innovator

Williams had always tinkered with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she once explained. She obtained her first upright piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she told the story of her first "disassembling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she wrote: Williams took off a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor alongside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she explained.

Early on, Williams learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for improvising a section. However, he detected her potential: the next week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

In time, Brubeck call 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. However, despite her long journeys to study the genre – first, to the more modern styles of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before tracing a path back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she rapidly felt disillusioned with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the veteran'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 "boys’ club," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of securing work – and of a corporate industry riding on the coattails of artists in need.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of core values," she wrote in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, direct, openly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans individual. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her chosen artistic field 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."

A Journey of Independence

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 relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the huge potential of the internet