🔗 Share this article

Perusing the jazz records at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, artist Kye Potter came across a battered tape by American pianist Jessica Williams. It appeared like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had come off the tape," he notes. "It was personally duplicated, with xeroxed liners, a touch of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector keenly focused on the avant-garde movement post John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared atypical for Williams, who was primarily recognized for producing lively jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a sonic explorer – for her concerts, she asked for pianos without the cover to facilitate to access the interior and pluck the strings – it was a dimension that seldom found its way on her releases.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to see if any more recordings were available. She provided four recordings of altered piano from the 1980s – two performance tapes, two recorded in a studio. Even though she had ceased playing publicly some time before, she also enclosed some recent work. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synth tapes – complete albums," says Potter.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams throughout the pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was published in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, during the project. She was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter says. Williams had been vocal concerning her difficulties following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "Yet I feel her character, fortitude, assurance and the peace she found through her spiritual pursuits all shone through in conversation."

Within her more recent synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – defiantly tagged "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a musician attempting to break free of expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano echoes, demonstrates that that impulse reached back decades. Instead of a consistent piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic associations: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, far-off chimes, beasts in pens, and little machines spluttering into life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with colossal bellows dissolving into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Listener Praise

Guitarist Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the power of her music, but knew little of her dreamlike prepared piano prior to this release. Shortly after seeing 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 link with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Technical Precursors

Williams’ prepared sounds have historical forerunners: consider John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the groundbreaking approaches of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how effectively she merges these new sounds with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The stylistic approach rarely departs from that which she cultivated in a body of work extending to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are driven by the effervescent force of an improviser in full control. It’s thrilling stuff.

A Constant Innovator

Throughout her life, Williams tinkered with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she once explained. She obtained her first home piano in 1954. In her writings, she shared the anecdote of her first "taking apart" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she commented: Williams detached a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor beside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she explained.

Williams originally studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for improvising a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the next week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Subsequently, Brubeck refer to Williams "among the finest 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 long journeys to educate herself the genre – first, to the more modern styles of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before tracing a path back 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 senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "boys’ club," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of securing work – and of a profit-driven sector profiting from the work of artists in need.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of core values," she wrote in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, direct, expressly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans individual. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her chosen artistic field for a period, imagine what kind of inhumane bullshit 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. Following a period in the active Bay Area scene, she lived in smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, moving to Portland in 1991, and later relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams saw early on the great promise of the internet