🔗 Share this article

Flipping through the jazz section at a local record store a few years ago, artist Kye Potter came across a battered tape by American pianist Jessica Williams. It looked like the classic independent effort. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he says. "It was copied at home, with xeroxed liners, a dab of fluorescent marker to emphasize the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector deeply fascinated by the U.S. experimental scene post John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared out of character for Williams, who was best known for producing sparkling jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a sonic explorer – for her concerts, she required pianos without the cover to allow her to reach inside and pluck the strings – it was a aspect that infrequently appeared on her releases.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to see if additional recordings were available. She provided four recordings of altered piano from the mid 1980s – two concert recordings, two recorded in a studio. And though she had stepped away from public performance previously, she also enclosed some recent work. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – complete albums," Potter explains.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams during the Covid pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was issued in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter states. Williams had been open regarding her hardships following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "Yet I feel her character, fortitude, assurance and the peace she found through meditative practices all came out in conversation."

Within her more recent synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – boldly labeled "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a artist seeking to break free of convention. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano reverberations, shows that that desire reached back decades. Rather than a homogenous piano sound, the piano creates a multitude of sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, creatures in enclosures, and small devices sparking to life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with massive roars giving way to growling, sharply accented riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. 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 knew little of her surreal-sounding prepared piano prior to this release. Soon after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Technical Precursors

These modified tones have historical forerunners: reflect on John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the innovative methods of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how successfully she merges these novel textures with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The stylistic approach hardly ever strays from that which she honed in a body of work extending to more than 80 albums, meaning the new trippily tinted sounds are driven by the effervescent force of an artist in full control. This is electrifying music.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams consistently explored the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she reportedly said. She was given her first vertical piano in 1954. On her blog, she shared the anecdote of her first "disassembling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she commented: Williams took off a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor alongside her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she stated.

Early on, Williams studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for altering a section. But he saw her potential: a week later, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Subsequently, 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, exhibits her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. However, despite her dedicated efforts 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 soon grew disenchanted with the jazz world.

After moving 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 emerged as a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "old boys' network," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of landing performances – and of a corporate industry riding on the coattails of financially strained musicians.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she penned in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, honest, openly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans woman. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her chosen artistic field for a period, imagine what kind of cruel nonsense she must have endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Her professional path 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 understood from the beginning the immense possibilities of the internet