🔗 Share this article

Flipping through the jazz records at a local record store a few years ago, artist Kye Potter found a battered tape by musician Jessica Williams. It looked like the classic independent effort. "The labels had detached from the tape," he notes. "It was home-dubbed, with photocopied notes, a little bit 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 after John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared out of character for Williams, who was best known for creating vibrant jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a sonic explorer – during her performances, she required pianos lacking the lid to allow her to access the interior and play the strings directly – it was a dimension that infrequently appeared on her releases.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to ask if additional recordings had been made. She responded with four recordings of altered piano from the mid-80s – two live, two made in the studio. Even though she had ceased playing publicly some time before, she also enclosed some newer material. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synth tapes – full releases," says Potter.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams throughout the pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was released in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, during the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter states. Williams had been open regarding her difficulties following spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "Yet I feel her character, fortitude, assurance and the peace she found through meditative practices all were evident in conversation."

In her subsequent electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – defiantly tagged "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a pianist seeking to escape tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano echoes, shows that that drive stretched back decades. Rather than a consistent piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic evocations: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, animals rattling around cages, and little machines spluttering into life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with colossal bellows dissolving into biting, staccato riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Guitarist Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Vocalist 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 had scant knowledge of her surreal-sounding prepared piano until this release. Not long after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Historical Influences

These modified tones have technical precursors: consider John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the innovative methods of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how successfully she blends these innovative timbres with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. Her musical speech hardly ever strays from that which she developed in a catalog stretching to more than 80 albums, meaning the new psychedelically coloured sounds are driven by the fizzy energy of an performer in full control. This is electrifying music.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams had always experimented with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she once explained. 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 commented: Williams detached a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor next to her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she wrote.

Williams originally studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for improvising a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the following week, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Brubeck would later call 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 immersion in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. However, despite her long journeys 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 rapidly felt 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 turned into a strident, public critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "boys’ club," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of securing work – and of a commercial business riding on the coattails of artists in need.

"I am continually 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. Likewise, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, direct, expressly political 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 preferred musical arena 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

The artist's trajectory evolved into self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint 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 recognized early the huge potential of the internet