🔗 Share this article

While browsing the jazz records at a local record store a few years ago, collector Kye Potter came across a well-used recording by musician Jessica Williams. It looked like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he recalls. "It was personally duplicated, with xeroxed liners, a touch of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector particularly interested in the avant-garde movement after John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed atypical for Williams, who was primarily recognized for making vibrant jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a sonic explorer – at her live shows, she asked for pianos lacking the lid to make it easier to get inside and play the strings directly – it was a aspect that rarely made it on her albums.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to ask if further recordings were available. She responded with four recordings of prepared piano from the mid-80s – two concert recordings, two studio creations. Although she had long since retired years earlier, she also enclosed some newer material. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synth tapes – entire projects," says Potter.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams throughout the pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was published in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, during the project. She was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter states. Williams had been public about her difficulties following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "However, I believe her personality, strength, self-confidence and the peace she found through having a spiritual practice all came out in conversation."

In later 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 trying to escape convention. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano reverberations, demonstrates that that impulse stretched back decades. Rather than a consistent piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic evocations: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, far-off chimes, beasts in pens, and tiny engines sparking to life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with massive roars collapsing into biting, staccato riffs.

Listener Praise

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the power of her music, but knew little of her surreal-sounding prepared piano before this release. Shortly after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Now that seems completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Technical Precursors

Her altered piano techniques have historical forerunners: reflect on John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the radical techniques of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how masterfully she merges these novel textures with her own soulful language at the keyboard. Her musical speech hardly ever strays from that which she developed in a catalog extending to more than 80 albums, meaning the new psychedelically coloured sounds are powered by the effervescent force of an artist in total mastery. That's electrifying music.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams consistently explored the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she noted in an interview. She obtained her first vertical piano in 1954. In her writings, she told the story of her first "taking apart" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she wrote: Williams removed 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 wrote.

Initially, Williams trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for improvising a section. But he saw her potential: the following week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Subsequently, Brubeck refer to Williams "among the finest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was equally admiring. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, shows her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. Yet, despite her long journeys to study the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches 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.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a strident, public critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of securing work – and of a profit-driven sector riding on the coattails of financially strained musicians.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of core values," she penned in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was eclectic, unflinching, openly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans individual. As one critic noted: "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 suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Her professional path evolved into self-sufficiency. Following a period in the active Bay Area scene, she lived in smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, moving to Portland in 1991, and later relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams understood from the beginning the great promise of the internet