🔗 Share this article

Flipping through the jazz section at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, artist Kye Potter discovered a worn cassette by musician Jessica Williams. It seemed like the classic independent effort. "The labels had come off the tape," he notes. "It was copied at home, with photocopied notes, a touch of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector keenly focused on the U.S. experimental scene post John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed out of character for Williams, who was best known for making lively jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the California jazz community knew her as a sonic explorer – at her live shows, she asked for pianos lacking the lid to make it easier to access the interior and play the strings directly – it was a dimension that infrequently appeared on her albums.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to see if further recordings existed. She sent back four recordings of modified piano from the 1980s – two live, two made in the studio. And though she had ceased playing publicly years earlier, she also included some contemporary pieces. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – entire projects," Potter recounts.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams in the pandemic era to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was released in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, during the project. She was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter states. Williams had been vocal concerning her difficulties following spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "Yet I feel her personality, strength, self-confidence and the serenity she found through meditative practices all came out in conversation."

In later synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – defiantly tagged "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a artist attempting to escape expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano resonances, shows that that impulse extended back decades. In place of a consistent piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, creatures in enclosures, and little machines spluttering into life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with colossal bellows giving way to biting, staccato riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Musician Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the power of her music, but knew little of her surreal-sounding prepared piano prior to this release. Soon after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Artistic Forebears

Williams’ prepared sounds have artistic antecedents: think of John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the radical techniques of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how successfully she merges these innovative timbres with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The language hardly ever strays 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 bubbling vitality of an improviser in complete command. That's electrifying music.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams had always explored the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she noted in an interview. She received her first vertical piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she told the story of her first "dismantling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she noted: Williams took off a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor alongside her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she wrote.

Williams originally trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for altering a section. But he saw her potential: a week later, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Subsequently, Brubeck 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, exhibits her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. Yet, despite her long journeys to learn about 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 soon grew disillusioned with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "old boys' network," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of landing performances – and of a commercial business riding on the coattails of financially strained musicians.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure 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 broad in scope, honest, expressly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans woman. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her desired musical domain for a period, imagine what kind of inhumane bullshit she must have endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

The artist's trajectory arced towards self-sufficiency. After time in the active Bay Area scene, she relocated to 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 recognized early the huge potential of the internet