🔗 Share this article

While browsing the jazz section at a local record store a few years ago, producer Kye Potter found a battered tape by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It appeared like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he recalls. "It was copied at home, with photocopied notes, a little bit of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector particularly interested in the U.S. experimental scene post John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt out of character for Williams, who was most famous for creating lively jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the California jazz community knew her as a sonic explorer – during her performances, she required pianos without the cover to make it easier to access the interior and play the strings directly – it was a facet that seldom found its way on her releases.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to ask if additional recordings were available. She provided four recordings of altered piano from the mid 1980s – two live, two recorded in a studio. And though she had ceased playing publicly some time before, she also enclosed some contemporary pieces. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – full releases," Potter explains.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams during the Covid pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was released in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, midway through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter reveals. Williams had been open regarding her struggles after spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "However, I believe her personality, strength, self-confidence and the calmness 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) – defiantly tagged "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a artist seeking to transcend convention. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano resonances, reveals that that drive extended back decades. Instead of a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic impressions: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, remote carillons, creatures in enclosures, and small devices sparking to life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with massive roars giving way to biting, staccato riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Guitarist Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the intensity of her music, but knew little of her surreal-sounding prepared piano before this release. Shortly after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "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

These modified tones have technical precursors: consider John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the groundbreaking approaches of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how successfully she merges these innovative timbres with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The stylistic approach rarely departs from that which she cultivated in a catalog extending to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new trippily tinted sounds are powered by the effervescent force of an improviser in total mastery. That's thrilling stuff.

A Constant Innovator

Williams consistently experimented with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she once explained. She was given her first upright piano in 1954. On her blog, she recounted the tale of her first "dismantling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she wrote: Williams removed a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor beside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she wrote.

Initially, Williams trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for embellishing a section. But he saw her potential: the following week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

Brubeck would later call Williams "among the finest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was just as awed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, displays her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. Yet, despite her extensive studies to educate herself the genre – first, to the hipper sounds of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before moving backwards to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she rapidly felt disappointed with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "old boys' network," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of securing work – and of a corporate industry riding on the coattails of artists in need.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she stated in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, unflinching, openly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans individual. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her preferred musical arena 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

The artist's trajectory arced towards self-sufficiency. Following a period in the active Bay Area scene, she relocated to smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, making a home in Portland in 1991, and later moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the huge potential of the internet