🔗 Share this article

Perusing the jazz aisle at a local record store a few years ago, artist Kye Potter came across a worn cassette by musician Jessica Williams. It looked like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had detached from the tape," he says. "It was personally duplicated, with printed inserts, a little bit of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector deeply fascinated by the avant-garde movement post John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed out of character for Williams, who was most famous for producing sparkling jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a musical experimenter – for her concerts, she required pianos with the top removed to facilitate to access the interior and play the strings directly – it was a dimension that rarely made it on her records.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to inquire if further recordings had been made. She responded with four recordings of prepared piano from the mid-80s – two live, two made in the studio. And though she had ceased playing publicly previously, she also enclosed some newer material. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – entire projects," says Potter.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams during the Covid pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was issued in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, during the project. She was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter says. Williams had been open regarding her struggles following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "But I think her character, fortitude, assurance and the serenity she found through meditative practices all came out in conversation."

Within her more recent 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 artist seeking to break free of convention. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano reverberations, shows that that desire extended back decades. Rather than a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic evocations: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, remote carillons, creatures in enclosures, and little machines sparking to life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with massive roars collapsing into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Guitarist Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the power of her music, but knew little of her dreamlike prepared piano until this release. Soon after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Technical Precursors

Her altered piano techniques have artistic antecedents: think of John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the innovative methods of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how effectively she fuses these novel textures with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The language rarely departs from that which she cultivated in a body of work spanning more than 80 albums, so that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are fueled by the effervescent force of an performer in full control. This is thrilling stuff.

A Constant Innovator

Williams consistently experimented with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she noted in an interview. She obtained her first home piano in 1954. In her writings, she shared the anecdote of her first "dismantling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she noted: Williams removed a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor alongside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she explained.

Williams originally trained in 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 reprimanded her for altering a section. But he saw her potential: a week later, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

Brubeck would later call Williams "one of the greatest 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 immersion in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. However, despite her extensive studies to educate herself the genre – first, to the more modern styles of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before tracing a path back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she quickly became disenchanted with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met 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 low wages, the jazz "boys’ club," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of getting gigs – and of a profit-driven sector benefiting from the efforts of financially strained musicians.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she stated in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, unflinching, expressly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans individual. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her chosen artistic field 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

Her professional path arced towards self-sufficiency. After time in the active 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 understood from the beginning the huge potential of the internet