🔗 Share this article

While browsing the jazz aisle at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, collector Kye Potter found a battered tape by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It appeared like the classic independent effort. "The labels had detached from the tape," he recalls. "It was personally duplicated, with xeroxed liners, a little bit of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector deeply fascinated by the U.S. experimental scene post John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared atypical for Williams, who was best known for making sparkling jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the West Coast scene knew her as a creative innovator – during her performances, she asked for pianos with the top removed to facilitate to reach inside and pluck the strings – it was a aspect that rarely made it on her releases.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to inquire if any more recordings were available. She sent back four recordings of prepared piano from the 1980s – two live, two made in the studio. Although she had ceased playing publicly years earlier, she also enclosed some recent work. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – complete albums," says Potter.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams throughout the pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was published in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter states. Williams had been open regarding her struggles after spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "But I think her personality, strength, self-confidence and the serenity she found through meditative practices all came out 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 trying to transcend convention. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano echoes, shows that that impulse extended back decades. In place of a uniform piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic associations: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, remote carillons, beasts in pens, and tiny engines spluttering into life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with colossal bellows dissolving into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Listener Praise

Guitarist Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Jessika Kenney, who has partnered 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 had scant knowledge of her otherworldly prepared piano prior to this release. Shortly 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 relationship with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Historical Influences

These modified tones have artistic antecedents: think of John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the innovative methods of American eccentric Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how successfully she blends these novel textures with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The stylistic approach scarcely deviates from that which she developed in a catalog spanning more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are fueled by the effervescent force of an artist in complete command. It’s exhilarating material.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Throughout her life, Williams explored the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she noted in an interview. She obtained her first vertical piano in 1954. In her writings, she told the story of her first "dismantling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she commented: Williams detached a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor alongside her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she stated.

Early on, Williams trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for embellishing a section. But he saw her potential: the next week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Subsequently, Brubeck refer to 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 trademark playful pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her dedicated efforts to learn about the genre – first, to the hipper sounds 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.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of landing performances – and of a corporate industry benefiting from the efforts of struggling artists.

"I am continually disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she penned in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was eclectic, unflinching, openly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a transgender woman. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that chased 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

Her professional path arced towards self-sufficiency. Following a period in the active Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, making a home in Portland in 1991, and later moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the immense possibilities of the internet