🔗 Share this article

While browsing the jazz section at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, artist Kye Potter discovered a battered tape by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It seemed like the classic independent effort. "The labels had detached from the tape," he notes. "It was copied at home, with photocopied notes, 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 fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared unusual from Williams, who was best known for creating lively jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the California jazz community knew her as a sonic explorer – for her concerts, she required pianos lacking the lid to make it easier to access the interior and pluck the strings – it was a aspect that seldom found its way on her albums.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to see if additional recordings had been made. She responded with four recordings of prepared piano from the mid 1980s – two live, two recorded in a studio. Even though she had long since retired previously, she also included some newer material. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – full releases," Potter recounts.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams in the pandemic era to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was published in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, midway through the project. She was 73. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter states. Williams had been public about her hardships following spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "But I think her personality, strength, self-confidence and the peace she found through having a spiritual practice all shone through in conversation."

Within her more recent 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, reveals that that impulse extended back decades. In place of a consistent piano sound, the piano creates a multitude of sonic evocations: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, distant church bells, creatures in enclosures, and tiny engines coughing to start. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with colossal bellows giving way to biting, staccato riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the power of her music, but had scant knowledge of her surreal-sounding prepared piano prior to this release. Not long after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Today, that appears completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Technical Precursors

Williams’ prepared sounds have historical forerunners: consider John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the groundbreaking approaches of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how effectively she fuses these novel textures with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The stylistic approach hardly ever strays from that which she developed in a discography stretching to more than 80 albums, so that the new trippily tinted sounds are fueled by the bubbling vitality of an performer in complete command. This is electrifying music.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Throughout her life, Williams explored the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she once explained. She received her first vertical piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she told the story of her first "disassembling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she noted: Williams removed a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor next to her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she stated.

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

Jazz World Disillusionment

In time, 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 knowledge of jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. However, despite her dedicated efforts 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 encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of securing work – and of a commercial business benefiting from the efforts of struggling artists.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of core values," she penned in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, unflinching, 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 cruel nonsense she must have faced as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

Forging an Autonomous Career

Williams’ career arced towards self-sufficiency. Following a period in the active 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 understood from the beginning the huge potential of the internet