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While browsing the jazz aisle 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 quintessential DIY release. "The labels had detached from the tape," he says. "It was copied at home, with printed inserts, a dab of fluorescent marker to accentuate the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector keenly focused on the avant-garde movement after John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed atypical for Williams, who was best known for making sparkling jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the California jazz community knew her as a creative innovator – at her live shows, she required pianos with the top removed to allow her to get inside and pluck the strings – it was a facet that seldom found its way on her records.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to see if additional recordings existed. She responded with four recordings of prepared piano from the mid 1980s – two live, two made in the studio. Although she had long since retired previously, she also shared some contemporary pieces. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synth tapes – entire projects," says Potter.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams throughout the pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was issued in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, during the project. She was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter says. Williams had been open regarding her hardships after spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "Yet I feel her personality, strength, self-confidence and the peace she found through having a spiritual practice all came out in conversation."

In her subsequent 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 break free of tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano reverberations, reveals that that impulse reached back decades. Instead of a consistent piano sound, the piano creates numerous distinct sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, animals rattling around cages, and little machines coughing to start. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with massive roars collapsing into biting, staccato riffs.

Listener Praise

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the intensity of her music, but knew little of her surreal-sounding 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 remembers. "Today, that appears completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Technical Precursors

Her altered piano techniques have artistic antecedents: consider John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the innovative methods of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how successfully she blends these new sounds with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. Her musical speech rarely departs from that which she developed in a discography extending to more than 80 albums, so that the new trippily tinted sounds are powered by the effervescent force of an improviser in full control. That's thrilling stuff.

A Constant Innovator

Williams consistently explored the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she reportedly said. She obtained her first vertical piano in 1954. On her blog, she told the story of her first "disassembling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she commented: Williams removed a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor alongside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she stated.

Initially, Williams trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for altering a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the next week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Brubeck would later 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 characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her dedicated efforts to educate herself the genre – first, to the hipper sounds of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before moving backwards to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she rapidly felt disenchanted with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "old boys' network," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of getting gigs – and of a profit-driven sector benefiting from the efforts of financially strained musicians.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of core values," she wrote in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, direct, openly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about 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 evolved into 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 understood from the beginning the huge potential of the internet