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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 detached from the tape," he recalls. "It was copied at home, with printed inserts, a dab of fluorescent marker to accentuate the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector keenly focused on the U.S. experimental scene after John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt unusual from Williams, who was best known for producing sparkling jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a creative innovator – during her performances, she asked for pianos lacking the lid to allow her to access the interior and pluck the strings – it was a facet that infrequently appeared on her albums.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to see if further recordings had been made. She responded with four recordings of altered piano from the mid-80s – two concert recordings, two made in the studio. Although she had stepped away from public performance previously, she also shared some contemporary pieces. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synth tapes – complete albums," says Potter.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams in the pandemic era to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was issued in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, during the project. She was 73. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter states. Williams had been public about her struggles 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 having a spiritual practice all were evident in conversation."

In later synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – boldly labeled "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a musician attempting to escape expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano reverberations, reveals that that impulse stretched back decades. In place of a uniform piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic impressions: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, distant church bells, animals rattling around cages, and small devices sparking to life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with monumental roars giving way to growling, sharply accented riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has worked 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 was largely unaware of her dreamlike prepared piano prior to this release. Not long after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Today, that appears completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Historical Influences

Williams’ prepared sounds have historical forerunners: think of John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the groundbreaking approaches of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how effectively she blends these innovative timbres with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The stylistic approach rarely departs from that which she developed in a discography stretching to more than 80 albums, so that the new trippily tinted sounds are powered by the fizzy energy of an artist in full control. It’s thrilling stuff.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Throughout her life, Williams tinkered with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she noted in an interview. She received her first vertical piano in 1954. In her writings, she shared the anecdote of her first "taking apart" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she commented: Williams took off a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor next to her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she explained.

Initially, Williams trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she brought 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 mastered his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

Brubeck would later call Williams "among the finest 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 absorption in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. However, despite her long journeys to study the genre – first, to the hipper sounds of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before working her way back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she quickly became disenchanted with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "boys’ club," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of landing performances – and of a corporate industry benefiting from the efforts of struggling artists.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of core values," she stated in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, unflinching, openly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans woman. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her desired musical domain 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 moved toward self-sufficiency. After time in the active Bay Area scene, she lived in 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 recognized early the huge potential of the internet