🔗 Share this article

Perusing the jazz aisle at a local record store a few years ago, collector Kye Potter discovered a battered tape by musician Jessica Williams. It looked like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had detached from the tape," he says. "It was personally duplicated, with printed inserts, a touch of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector keenly focused on the American musical avant garde following John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt unusual from Williams, who was most famous for creating sparkling jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the West Coast scene knew her as a sonic explorer – for her concerts, she asked for pianos with the top removed to facilitate to get inside and pluck the strings – it was a dimension that seldom found its way on her albums.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to see if additional recordings had been made. She sent back four recordings of prepared piano from the 1980s – two live, two recorded in a studio. And though she had ceased playing publicly years earlier, she also included some contemporary pieces. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synth tapes – entire projects," says Potter.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams in the pandemic era to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was published in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter reveals. Williams had been open regarding her struggles after spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "However, I believe her character, fortitude, assurance and the serenity she found through her spiritual pursuits all came out in conversation."

In her subsequent electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – boldly labeled "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a pianist trying to transcend tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano resonances, shows that that impulse reached back decades. Rather than a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates a multitude of sonic associations: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, distant church bells, creatures in enclosures, and little machines spluttering into life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with colossal bellows giving way to growling, sharply accented riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Guitarist Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the force of her music, but knew little of her surreal-sounding prepared piano prior to this release. Soon after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Today, that appears completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Artistic Forebears

These modified tones have historical forerunners: think of John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the groundbreaking approaches of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how successfully she merges these new sounds with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The stylistic approach scarcely deviates from that which she honed in a body of work stretching to more than 80 albums, so that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are driven by the effervescent force of an performer in complete command. It’s thrilling stuff.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams had always experimented with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she noted in an interview. She was given her first home piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she told the story of her first "dismantling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she wrote: Williams took off a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor beside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she stated.

Early on, Williams studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for altering a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the following week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Subsequently, Brubeck describe Williams "among the finest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was similarly impressed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, displays her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. However, despite her extensive studies to study 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 soon grew disillusioned with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a strident, public critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "boys’ club," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of landing performances – and of a profit-driven sector profiting from the work of artists in need.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she penned in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was eclectic, honest, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans woman. A commentator observed: "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 suffered 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 vibrant Bay Area scene, she lived in smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling in Portland in 1991, and later going to a more remote location, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the great promise of the internet