🔗 Share this article

Perusing the jazz section at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, producer Kye Potter found a well-used recording by musician Jessica Williams. It seemed like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had come off the tape," he notes. "It was personally duplicated, with photocopied notes, a touch of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector deeply fascinated by the American musical avant garde post John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed atypical for Williams, who was most famous for creating vibrant jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a creative innovator – at her live shows, she requested pianos lacking the lid to allow her to access the interior and play the strings directly – it was a dimension that infrequently appeared on her records.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to see if additional recordings had been made. She sent back four recordings of modified piano from the mid-80s – two concert recordings, two made in the studio. Even though she had ceased playing publicly previously, she also shared some contemporary pieces. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synth tapes – full releases," Potter explains.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams in the pandemic era to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was issued in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. She was 73. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter states. Williams had been public about her struggles after spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "But I think her personality, strength, self-confidence and the serenity she found through her spiritual pursuits all came out in conversation."

Within her more recent 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 pianist trying to transcend expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano resonances, shows that that impulse extended back decades. Rather than a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates numerous distinct sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, distant church bells, beasts in pens, and small devices sparking to life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with colossal bellows collapsing into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the power of her music, but was largely unaware of her otherworldly prepared piano prior to this release. Shortly after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Today, that appears completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Technical Precursors

Williams’ prepared sounds have artistic antecedents: think of John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the innovative methods of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how effectively she blends these new sounds with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The language rarely departs from that which she developed in a catalog spanning more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are driven by the bubbling vitality of an improviser in complete command. This is thrilling stuff.

A Constant Innovator

Throughout her life, Williams experimented with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she noted in an interview. She was given her first home piano in 1954. On her blog, she shared the anecdote of her first "taking apart" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she wrote: Williams removed a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor alongside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she explained.

Early on, Williams studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for altering a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the next week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

In time, Brubeck refer to Williams "one of the greatest 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 immersion in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Yet, despite her dedicated efforts to learn about the genre – first, to the more modern styles of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before moving backwards to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she rapidly felt disenchanted with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a strident, public critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "boys’ club," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of getting gigs – and of a profit-driven sector profiting from the work of struggling artists.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she stated in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, unflinching, openly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans woman. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that chased 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."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Williams’ career moved toward self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she relocated to smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling in Portland in 1991, and later relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the huge potential of the internet