🔗 Share this article

Perusing the jazz aisle at a local record store a few years ago, collector Kye Potter discovered a worn cassette by musician Jessica Williams. It seemed like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had come off the tape," he says. "It was personally duplicated, with xeroxed liners, a touch of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector particularly interested in the American musical avant garde post John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt unusual from Williams, who was primarily recognized for making vibrant jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the California jazz community knew her as a sonic explorer – at her live shows, she required pianos without the cover to facilitate to get inside and play the strings directly – it was a dimension that infrequently appeared on her records.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to ask if any more recordings were available. She sent back four recordings of modified piano from the mid 1980s – two live, two made in the studio. Although she had ceased playing publicly previously, she also enclosed some recent work. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – full releases," says Potter.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams in the pandemic era to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was released in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. She was 73. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter states. Williams had been public about her struggles following spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "But I think her personality, strength, self-confidence and the serenity she found through having a spiritual practice all were evident in conversation."

In her subsequent 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 attempting to transcend tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano resonances, shows that that desire extended back decades. Instead of a consistent piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic associations: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, remote carillons, creatures in enclosures, and small devices spluttering into life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with massive roars collapsing into biting, staccato riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Musician Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the intensity of her music, but knew little of her otherworldly prepared piano before this release. Not long after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Today, that appears completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was known 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 successfully she merges these novel textures with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The stylistic approach rarely departs from that which she developed in a catalog spanning more than 80 albums, so that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are driven by the fizzy energy of an improviser in complete command. That's electrifying music.

An Eternal Tinkerer

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 upright piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she recounted the tale of her first "dismantling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she noted: Williams took off a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor beside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she stated.

Williams originally trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for embellishing a section. But he saw her potential: a week later, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

Subsequently, Brubeck describe Williams "one of the greatest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was just as awed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, exhibits her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Yet, despite her extensive studies to learn about the genre – first, to the hipper sounds 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 elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "boys’ club," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of landing performances – and of a commercial business riding on the coattails of financially strained musicians.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she wrote in the liner 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 rarely discussed her experiences as a transgender woman. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her preferred musical arena for a period, imagine what kind of terrible treatment she must have faced as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

Forging an Autonomous Career

Her professional path moved toward self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the bustling Bay Area scene, she relocated to smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling in Portland in 1991, and later going to a more remote location, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the immense possibilities of the internet