🔗 Share this article

Flipping through the jazz records at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, collector Kye Potter discovered a battered tape by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It appeared like the classic independent effort. "The labels had come off the tape," he says. "It was home-dubbed, with printed inserts, a little bit of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector deeply fascinated by the avant-garde movement following John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt atypical for Williams, who was primarily recognized for producing vibrant jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a musical experimenter – during her performances, she asked for pianos lacking the lid to make it easier to reach inside and play the strings directly – it was a dimension that seldom found its way on her albums.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to see if any more recordings had been made. She provided four recordings of altered piano from the 1980s – two live, two made in the studio. Even though she had long since retired some time before, she also shared some contemporary pieces. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – full releases," Potter recounts.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams during the Covid pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was released in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, during the project. She was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter reveals. Williams had been public about her difficulties following spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "But I think her personality, strength, self-confidence and the peace she found through having a spiritual practice all shone through in conversation."

In later electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – defiantly tagged "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a artist trying to break free of expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano reverberations, demonstrates that that desire stretched back decades. Instead of a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates numerous distinct sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, creatures in enclosures, and small devices spluttering into life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with colossal bellows giving way to snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Listener Praise

Musician Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the force of her music, but was largely unaware of her dreamlike prepared piano until this release. Soon after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Technical Precursors

These modified tones have historical forerunners: think of John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the innovative methods of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how successfully she merges these novel textures with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The stylistic approach hardly ever strays from that which she developed in a discography spanning more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are driven by the bubbling vitality of an improviser in total mastery. That's electrifying music.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams had always explored the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she reportedly said. She obtained her first upright piano in 1954. In her writings, she told the story of her first "disassembling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she wrote: Williams took off a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor beside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she stated.

Williams originally studied 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 scolded her for improvising a section. Yet he recognized her potential: a week later, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Subsequently, Brubeck describe 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 knowledge of jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. Yet, despite her dedicated efforts to educate herself 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 soon grew disenchanted with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a strident, public critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of securing work – and of a corporate industry profiting from the work of struggling artists.

"I am continually disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she wrote in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was eclectic, honest, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a transgender woman. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that pushed 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."

Forging an Autonomous Career

Her professional path moved toward self-sufficiency. Following a period in the active Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling in Portland in 1991, and later going to a more remote location, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams saw early on the great promise of the internet