🔗 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 looked like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had come off the tape," he notes. "It was home-dubbed, with printed inserts, a touch of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector keenly focused on the U.S. experimental scene post John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt out of character for Williams, who was primarily recognized for producing lively jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the California jazz community knew her as a sonic explorer – at her live shows, she asked for pianos with the top removed to allow her to reach inside and play the strings directly – it was a dimension that seldom found its way on her albums.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to ask if any more recordings were available. She responded with four recordings of altered piano from the mid-80s – two concert recordings, two studio creations. Even though she had stepped away from public performance some time before, she also included some contemporary pieces. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synth tapes – entire projects," says Potter.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams in the pandemic era to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was issued in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, during the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter reveals. Williams had been open regarding her hardships after spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "But I think 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 pianist attempting to break free of convention. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano reverberations, shows that that desire reached back decades. Instead of a consistent piano sound, the instrument creates numerous distinct sonic associations: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, far-off chimes, animals rattling around cages, and small devices sparking to life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with monumental roars giving way to biting, staccato riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Musician Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Vocalist 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 had scant knowledge of her dreamlike prepared piano until this release. Shortly after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Now that seems completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Artistic Forebears

Williams’ prepared sounds have technical precursors: consider John Cage’s modified instruments, or the radical techniques of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how effectively she blends these innovative timbres with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. Her musical speech rarely departs from that which she developed in a body of work spanning more than 80 albums, so that the new trippily tinted sounds are powered by the effervescent force of an artist in full control. It’s thrilling stuff.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams had always experimented with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she reportedly said. She obtained her first home piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she recounted the tale of her first "dismantling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she wrote: Williams detached a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor next to her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she stated.

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

Jazz World Disillusionment

Brubeck would later refer to Williams "a top-tier pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was equally admiring. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, exhibits her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. However, despite her long journeys to study the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before tracing a path back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she soon grew disillusioned with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "old boys' network," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of getting gigs – and of a commercial business benefiting from the efforts of struggling artists.

"I am continually disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of core values," she penned in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was eclectic, honest, openly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a transgender woman. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her desired musical domain 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

The artist's trajectory evolved into self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she lived in smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, moving to 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