🔗 Share this article

Perusing the jazz aisle at a local record store a few years ago, producer Kye Potter discovered a worn cassette by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It seemed like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had detached from the tape," he notes. "It was home-dubbed, with printed inserts, a little bit of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector particularly interested in the American musical avant garde following John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed atypical for Williams, who was primarily recognized for making sparkling jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a musical experimenter – for her concerts, she requested pianos without the cover to allow her to reach inside and pluck the strings – it was a facet that seldom found its way on her releases.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to ask if additional recordings had been made. She responded with four recordings of prepared piano from the mid-80s – two concert recordings, two studio creations. And though she had stepped away from public performance years earlier, she also included some newer material. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – complete albums," says Potter.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams during the Covid pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was released in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, part way through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter states. Williams had been vocal concerning her difficulties following 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 serenity she found through meditative practices all were evident in conversation."

In her subsequent 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 pianist trying to escape expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano resonances, shows that that impulse extended back decades. Rather than a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic associations: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, far-off chimes, creatures in enclosures, and little machines coughing to start. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with massive roars collapsing into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Listener Praise

Musician Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the force of her music, but had scant knowledge of her surreal-sounding prepared piano until this release. Not long after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Now that seems completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Historical Influences

Her altered piano techniques have historical forerunners: think of John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the groundbreaking approaches of American eccentric Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how effectively she fuses these novel textures with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. Her musical speech hardly ever strays from that which she developed in a discography stretching to more than 80 albums, meaning the new trippily tinted sounds are driven by the fizzy energy of an performer in complete command. This is electrifying music.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Throughout her life, Williams experimented with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she once explained. She received her first upright piano in 1954. On her blog, she recounted the tale of her first "dismantling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she wrote: Williams took off a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor next to her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she wrote.

Initially, Williams studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for improvising a section. But he saw her potential: a week later, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Subsequently, Brubeck call Williams "among the finest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was similarly impressed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, displays her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. However, despite her extensive studies to learn about the genre – first, to the more modern styles of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before working her way back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she rapidly felt disillusioned with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to 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 meagre pay, the jazz "old boys' network," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of landing performances – and of a commercial business benefiting from the efforts of struggling artists.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she stated in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was eclectic, unflinching, openly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans woman. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her chosen artistic field for a period, imagine what kind of cruel nonsense she must have faced as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

Williams’ career arced towards self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she lived in 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 understood from the beginning the huge potential of the internet