Blue Abstraction: Jessica Williams’ prepared-piano tapes issued after her death

An album of prepared-piano recordings by American pianist Jessica Williams, assembled with artist Kye Potter, was released on Matt Connors’s Pre‑Echo Press in late 2025; Williams died in 2022, part way through the project, at the age of 73. Potter first discovered a battered, home‑dubbed tape called Prepared Piano in a record shop and contacted Williams, who sent him four prepared‑piano recordings from the mid‑1980s (two live, two studio) and a number of more recent synth tapes.

Potter worked with Williams during the Covid pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction. The album foregrounds altered piano reverberations and a wide palette of sounds — what the Guardian piece describes as evocations of cimbaloms, gamelan, distant church bells, animals and small machines — folded into Williams’s blues‑tinged keyboard vocabulary.

Williams was best known for straight‑ahead jazz alongside a long habit of experimentation: she sometimes requested pianos without the cover to reach and strum the strings, and kept a Currents blog detailing her approaches. Her career included a Peabody Conservatory classical background, wide admiration from peers (Dave Brubeck called her "one of the greatest pianists I have ever heard"), a 2004 Grammy nomination for Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, and later electronic and groove‑focused releases such as Blood Music and the Virtual Miles records.

Key Topics

Culture, Jessica Williams, Kye Potter, Matt Connors, Pre-echo Press, Prepared Piano