🔗 Share this article

While browsing the jazz section at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, producer Kye Potter came across a battered tape by American pianist Jessica Williams. It seemed like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he says. "It was copied at home, with photocopied notes, a dab of fluorescent marker to highlight the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector deeply fascinated by the U.S. experimental scene post John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared unusual from Williams, who was primarily recognized for creating vibrant jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the California jazz community knew her as a musical experimenter – at her live shows, she requested pianos without the cover to allow her to reach inside and strum the strings – it was a dimension that infrequently appeared on her records.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to ask if further recordings had been made. She responded with four recordings of prepared piano from the mid 1980s – two performance tapes, two made in the studio. Although she had stepped away from public performance years earlier, she also shared some contemporary pieces. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – complete albums," Potter explains.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams throughout the pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was published in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, during the project. She was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter says. Williams had been public about her difficulties after spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "But I think her personality, strength, self-confidence and the serenity 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 artist trying to escape expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano echoes, demonstrates that that impulse extended back decades. Instead of a homogenous piano sound, the piano creates numerous distinct sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, creatures in enclosures, and tiny engines coughing to start. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with massive roars collapsing into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Musician Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the power of her music, but had scant knowledge of her surreal-sounding prepared piano before this release. Soon after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Historical Influences

Her altered piano techniques have technical precursors: consider John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the groundbreaking approaches of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how effectively she fuses these new sounds with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The language hardly ever strays from that which she honed in a discography spanning more than 80 albums, meaning the new psychedelically coloured sounds are driven by the effervescent force of an improviser in complete command. That's thrilling stuff.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams consistently explored the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she reportedly said. She was given her first home piano in 1954. In her writings, she shared the anecdote of her first "disassembling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she commented: Williams detached a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor next to her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she wrote.

Early on, Williams learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for improvising a section. But he saw her potential: a week later, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Brubeck would later refer to Williams "among the finest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was just as awed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, displays her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her long journeys to educate herself the genre – first, to the more modern styles of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before working her way back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she quickly became disenchanted with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "boys’ club," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of getting gigs – and of a corporate industry profiting from the work of struggling artists.

"I am continually disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of core values," she wrote in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, honest, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans individual. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her desired musical domain for a period, imagine what kind of inhumane bullshit she must have faced as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

Forging an Autonomous Career

Williams’ career moved toward self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the bustling Bay Area scene, she lived in smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, moving to Portland in 1991, and later moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams saw early on the immense possibilities of the internet