🔗 Share this article

Perusing the jazz section at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, producer Kye Potter found a worn cassette by American pianist Jessica Williams. It looked like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had come off the tape," he recalls. "It was home-dubbed, with photocopied notes, a touch of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

As 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 unusual from Williams, who was most famous for creating sparkling jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the California jazz community knew her as a musical experimenter – for her concerts, she requested pianos without the cover to allow her to reach inside and strum the strings – it was a facet that seldom found its way on her albums.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to ask if any more recordings were available. She provided four recordings of altered piano from the mid-80s – two concert recordings, two recorded in a studio. And though she had stepped away from public performance previously, she also enclosed some newer material. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synth tapes – complete albums," says Potter.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams throughout the pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was issued in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. She was 73. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter states. Williams had been open regarding her hardships after spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "However, I believe her character, fortitude, assurance and the peace she found through her spiritual pursuits all shone through in conversation."

In later electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – boldly labeled "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a artist trying to escape expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano resonances, reveals that that desire stretched back decades. Rather than a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates a multitude of sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, remote carillons, beasts in pens, and small devices coughing to start. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with monumental roars collapsing into biting, staccato riffs.

Listener Praise

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the force of her music, but was largely unaware of her surreal-sounding prepared piano until this release. Shortly after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Now that seems completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Artistic Forebears

Her altered piano techniques have technical precursors: think of John Cage’s modified instruments, or the groundbreaking approaches of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how successfully she fuses these new sounds with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. Her musical speech hardly ever strays from that which she developed in a catalog stretching to more than 80 albums, meaning the new psychedelically coloured sounds are powered by the effervescent force of an performer in complete command. This is exhilarating material.

A Constant Innovator

Throughout her life, Williams explored the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she reportedly said. She obtained her first upright piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she told the story of her first "disassembling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she commented: Williams detached a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor next to her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she stated.

Initially, Williams studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for improvising a section. Yet he recognized her potential: a week later, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

In time, Brubeck 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, shows her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. Yet, despite her dedicated efforts to study the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before working her way back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she quickly became disappointed with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "boys’ club," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of getting gigs – and of a profit-driven sector benefiting from the efforts of artists in need.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she penned in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, unflinching, openly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans woman. A writer pointed out: "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 endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

The artist's trajectory arced towards self-sufficiency. Following a period in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she relocated to 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 recognized early the great promise of the internet