🔗 Share this article

While browsing the jazz section at a local record store a few years ago, collector Kye Potter found a well-used recording by American pianist Jessica Williams. It looked like the classic independent effort. "The labels had detached from the tape," he says. "It was personally duplicated, with photocopied notes, a touch of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector keenly focused on the avant-garde movement following John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed atypical for Williams, who was most famous for creating lively jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the West Coast scene knew her as a musical experimenter – for her concerts, she asked for pianos lacking the lid to make it easier to get inside and play the strings directly – it was a dimension that infrequently appeared on her albums.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to ask if further recordings had been made. She responded with four recordings of prepared piano from the mid-80s – two performance tapes, two recorded in a studio. And though she had stepped away from public performance some time before, she also shared some recent work. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synth tapes – full releases," says Potter.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams in the pandemic era to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was released in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, midway through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter says. Williams had been open regarding her difficulties following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "However, I believe her character, fortitude, assurance and the peace she found through her spiritual pursuits all were evident in conversation."

In later 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 trying to transcend convention. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano echoes, demonstrates that that drive reached back decades. Rather than a uniform piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, remote carillons, animals rattling around cages, and tiny engines spluttering into life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with monumental roars dissolving into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Musician Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the intensity of her music, but was largely unaware of her dreamlike prepared piano until this release. Shortly after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Artistic Forebears

Williams’ prepared sounds have technical precursors: reflect on John Cage’s modified instruments, or the groundbreaking approaches of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how effectively she blends these new sounds with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. Her musical speech rarely departs from that which she cultivated in a body of work stretching to more than 80 albums, so that the new trippily tinted sounds are driven by the bubbling vitality of an improviser in complete command. It’s exhilarating material.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams consistently explored the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she reportedly said. She was given her first vertical piano in 1954. On her blog, she recounted the tale of her first "taking apart" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she commented: Williams took off a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor beside her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she explained.

Williams originally studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for embellishing a section. But he saw her potential: the next week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Subsequently, Brubeck describe Williams "a top-tier 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 characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her dedicated efforts to learn about the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before working her way back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she quickly became disillusioned with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a outspoken, vocal 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 securing work – and of a corporate industry profiting from the work of artists in need.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to coordinate, express, and advocate 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 eclectic, unflinching, 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 drove her from her desired musical domain for a period, imagine what kind of cruel nonsense she must have faced as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

Forging an Autonomous Career

Williams’ career moved toward self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, moving to Portland in 1991, and later moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams saw early on the huge potential of the internet