🔗 Share this article

While browsing the jazz aisle at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, collector Kye Potter discovered a well-used recording by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It looked like the classic independent effort. "The labels had detached from the tape," he says. "It was copied at home, with printed inserts, a little bit of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector keenly focused on the avant-garde movement after John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared atypical for Williams, who was most famous for creating sparkling jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the West Coast scene knew her as a musical experimenter – during her performances, she requested pianos without the cover to facilitate to reach inside and play the strings directly – it was a facet that infrequently appeared on her albums.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to see if any more recordings existed. She responded with four recordings of altered piano from the 1980s – two live, two made in the studio. Although she had ceased playing publicly some time before, she also enclosed some contemporary pieces. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – full releases," Potter recounts.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams in the pandemic era to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was released in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, during the project. She was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter reveals. Williams had been vocal concerning her difficulties following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "However, I believe her personality, strength, self-confidence and the serenity she found through her spiritual pursuits all came out in conversation."

In later 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 attempting to escape convention. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano reverberations, reveals that that desire stretched back decades. Rather than a uniform piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic evocations: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, far-off chimes, creatures in enclosures, and tiny engines spluttering into life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with monumental roars giving way to growling, sharply accented riffs.

Listener Praise

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the power of her music, but was largely unaware of her surreal-sounding prepared piano prior to this release. Shortly after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Artistic Forebears

Her altered piano techniques have artistic antecedents: think of John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the radical techniques of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how masterfully she fuses these innovative timbres with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The language hardly ever strays from that which she developed in a body of work spanning more than 80 albums, so that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are fueled by the fizzy energy of an improviser in full control. This is electrifying music.

A Constant Innovator

Throughout her life, Williams experimented with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she noted in an interview. She obtained her first vertical piano in 1954. On her blog, she recounted the tale of her first "disassembling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she wrote: Williams removed 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 stated.

Initially, Williams trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for improvising a section. However, he detected her potential: the following week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

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, shows her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her long journeys to study 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 rapidly felt disappointed with the jazz world.

Upon relocating 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 strident, public critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of landing performances – and of a profit-driven sector benefiting from the efforts of struggling artists.

"I am continually disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she wrote in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, direct, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans 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 inhumane bullshit she must have suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

Forging an Autonomous Career

The artist's trajectory moved toward self-sufficiency. Following a period in the bustling Bay Area scene, she lived in 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 recognized early the huge potential of the internet