🔗 Share this article

While browsing the jazz aisle at a local record store a few years ago, collector Kye Potter came across a worn cassette by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It looked like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he says. "It was home-dubbed, with printed inserts, a little bit of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector keenly focused on the U.S. experimental scene after John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared unusual from Williams, who was best known for making lively jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a sonic explorer – during her performances, she asked for pianos lacking the lid to allow her to reach inside and strum the strings – it was a facet that rarely made it on her albums.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to see if any more recordings had been made. She provided four recordings of prepared piano from the mid 1980s – two concert recordings, two made in the studio. And though she had stepped away from public performance previously, she also shared some contemporary pieces. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – full releases," Potter recounts.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams in the pandemic era to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was issued in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter reveals. Williams had been vocal concerning her struggles after spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "But I think her character, fortitude, assurance and the peace she found through her spiritual pursuits all were evident 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 pianist trying to transcend convention. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano echoes, shows that that impulse stretched back decades. In place of a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic impressions: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, far-off chimes, beasts in pens, and tiny engines spluttering into life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with monumental roars collapsing into biting, staccato riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Musician Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the intensity of her music, but knew little of her dreamlike prepared piano until this release. Not long after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Today, that appears completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Technical Precursors

Her altered piano techniques have artistic antecedents: think of John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the radical techniques of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how successfully she blends these novel textures with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The stylistic approach rarely departs from that which she cultivated in a discography stretching to more than 80 albums, meaning the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are driven by the effervescent force of an artist in total mastery. This is thrilling stuff.

A Constant Innovator

Williams consistently explored the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she once explained. She received her first upright piano in 1954. In her writings, she shared the anecdote of her first "dismantling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she noted: Williams detached a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor next to her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she stated.

Initially, Williams learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the standard canon 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 brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Brubeck would later refer to Williams "a top-tier pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was similarly impressed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, exhibits her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her extensive studies to learn about the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches 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.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "boys’ club," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of getting gigs – and of a commercial business benefiting from the efforts of struggling artists.

"I am continually 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 album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was eclectic, honest, openly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans individual. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her preferred musical arena for a period, imagine what kind of terrible treatment she must have endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

The artist's trajectory evolved into self-sufficiency. After time in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling in Portland in 1991, and later moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the great promise of the internet