🔗 Share this article

Flipping through the jazz section at a local record store a few years ago, collector Kye Potter came across a well-used recording by musician Jessica Williams. It looked like the classic independent effort. "The labels had come off the tape," he notes. "It was personally duplicated, with photocopied notes, a dab of fluorescent marker to highlight the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector particularly interested in the avant-garde movement after John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt atypical for Williams, who was most famous for producing lively jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the California jazz community knew her as a sonic explorer – for her concerts, she required pianos lacking the lid to facilitate to reach inside and play the strings directly – it was a facet that seldom found its way on her releases.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to inquire if additional recordings existed. She provided four recordings of modified piano from the mid-80s – two performance tapes, two studio creations. And though she had long since retired years earlier, she also shared some newer material. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – full releases," Potter recounts.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams throughout the pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was published in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away 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 prevented her from tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "But I think her personality, strength, self-confidence and the peace she found through her spiritual pursuits all shone through in conversation."

In later synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – explicitly categorized "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a pianist trying to transcend convention. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano reverberations, reveals that that impulse reached back decades. Rather than a uniform piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, remote carillons, beasts in pens, and little machines sparking to life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with monumental roars dissolving into biting, staccato riffs.

Listener Praise

Musician Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the intensity of her music, but was largely unaware of her dreamlike prepared piano until this release. Shortly after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Now that seems completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Technical Precursors

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 masterfully she fuses these new sounds with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The stylistic approach scarcely deviates from that which she honed in a body of work stretching to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are powered by the fizzy energy of an performer in total mastery. That's electrifying music.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams had always tinkered with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she noted in an interview. She received her first vertical piano in 1954. On her blog, she told the story of her first "disassembling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she commented: Williams took off 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 wrote.

Early on, Williams learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for embellishing a section. But he saw her potential: the following week, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

In time, Brubeck refer to 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, exhibits her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her long journeys to educate herself the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before tracing a path back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she quickly became disillusioned with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "boys’ club," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of landing performances – and of a corporate industry riding on the coattails of struggling artists.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of core values," she wrote in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, unflinching, expressly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans individual. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her preferred musical arena 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. Subsequent to a stint in the active Bay Area scene, she relocated to 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 saw early on the huge potential of the internet