🔗 Share this article

Perusing the jazz aisle at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, collector Kye Potter discovered a well-used recording by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It seemed like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had come off the tape," he notes. "It was copied at home, with photocopied notes, a touch of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector keenly focused on the American musical avant garde post John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed out of character for Williams, who was most famous for creating sparkling jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the West Coast scene knew her as a musical experimenter – for her concerts, she asked for pianos with the top removed to allow her to access the interior and pluck the strings – it was a aspect that seldom found its way on her releases.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to see if any more recordings were available. She responded with four recordings of prepared piano from the mid 1980s – two concert recordings, two recorded in a studio. And though she had ceased playing publicly some time before, she also shared some contemporary pieces. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synth tapes – full releases," Potter recounts.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams throughout the pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was published in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, part way through the project. She was 73. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter says. Williams had been open regarding her struggles following spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a diagnosis of cancer 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 electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – explicitly categorized "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a pianist trying to break free of convention. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano resonances, shows that that drive extended back decades. In place of a homogenous piano sound, the piano creates numerous distinct sonic impressions: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, far-off chimes, creatures in enclosures, and little machines sparking to life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with monumental roars dissolving into biting, staccato riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the force of her music, but had scant knowledge of her dreamlike prepared piano prior to this release. Shortly after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Now that seems completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Historical Influences

Williams’ prepared sounds have artistic antecedents: reflect on John Cage’s modified instruments, or the radical techniques of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how successfully she merges these novel textures with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The language scarcely deviates from that which she cultivated in a body of work extending to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are fueled by the bubbling vitality of an improviser in complete command. This is exhilarating material.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams had always experimented with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she reportedly said. She received her first upright piano in 1954. In her writings, she recounted the tale of her first "disassembling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she noted: Williams detached a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor alongside her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she wrote.

Initially, Williams learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for altering a section. Yet he recognized her potential: a week later, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

In time, Brubeck describe Williams "a top-tier pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was similarly impressed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, shows her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her signature clever 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 soon grew disappointed with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the veteran'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 "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of getting gigs – and of a corporate industry riding on the coattails of artists in need.

"I am continually disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of core values," she stated in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, unflinching, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans woman. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her preferred musical arena for a period, imagine what kind of terrible treatment she must have suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Her professional path arced towards self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the bustling Bay Area scene, she lived in smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, making a home in Portland in 1991, and later going to a more remote location, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams saw early on the immense possibilities of the internet