🔗 Share this article

While browsing the jazz aisle at a local record store a few years ago, collector Kye Potter found a battered tape by American pianist Jessica Williams. It looked like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had come off the tape," he recalls. "It was personally duplicated, with printed inserts, a dab of fluorescent marker to highlight the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector particularly interested in the U.S. experimental scene after John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt unusual from Williams, who was primarily recognized for making vibrant jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the California jazz community knew her as a creative innovator – for her concerts, she requested pianos lacking the lid to make it easier to reach inside and strum the strings – it was a aspect that seldom found its way on her releases.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to see if additional recordings existed. She responded with four recordings of altered piano from the 1980s – two performance tapes, two recorded in a studio. And though she had ceased playing publicly some time before, she also included some newer material. "She sent me around 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – entire projects," Potter explains.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams during the Covid pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was published in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, part way through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter reveals. Williams had been open regarding her hardships after spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "However, I believe her personality, strength, self-confidence and the serenity she found through her spiritual pursuits all were evident in conversation."

Within her more recent electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – explicitly categorized "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a artist seeking to break free of tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano reverberations, shows that that drive extended back decades. Rather than a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic impressions: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, remote carillons, beasts in pens, and small devices spluttering into life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with monumental roars giving way to snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Critical Acclaim

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))), saw Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the force of her music, but knew little of her dreamlike prepared piano prior to this release. Not long after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Now that seems completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Technical Precursors

Williams’ prepared sounds have artistic antecedents: consider John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the innovative methods of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how masterfully she merges these new sounds with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The language hardly ever strays from that which she developed in a discography extending to more than 80 albums, meaning the new psychedelically coloured sounds are driven by the bubbling vitality of an improviser in complete command. It’s thrilling stuff.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams had always explored the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she reportedly said. She was given her first upright piano in 1954. On her blog, she recounted the tale of her first "taking apart" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she noted: Williams took off a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor alongside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she stated.

Williams originally trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for improvising a section. However, he detected her potential: a week later, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Brubeck would later 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, shows her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. However, despite her extensive studies 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 soon grew disillusioned with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a strident, public critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "old boys' network," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of getting gigs – and of a corporate industry benefiting from the efforts of artists in need.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she stated in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, direct, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans woman. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her desired musical domain 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

The artist's trajectory evolved into self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the active Bay Area scene, she lived in 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 recognized early the great promise of the internet