🔗 Share this article

Flipping through the jazz section at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, producer Kye Potter found a worn cassette by American pianist Jessica Williams. It looked like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had come off the tape," he says. "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 following John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed unusual from Williams, who was primarily recognized for producing lively jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the West Coast scene knew her as a musical experimenter – during her performances, she required pianos lacking the lid to facilitate to get inside and pluck the strings – it was a aspect that infrequently appeared on her albums.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to inquire if further recordings had been made. She provided four recordings of modified piano from the 1980s – two concert recordings, two made in the studio. Although she had long since retired years earlier, she also enclosed some contemporary pieces. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – entire projects," says Potter.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams in the pandemic era to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was issued in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, part way through the project. She was 73. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter says. Williams had been public about her hardships after spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "But I think her personality, strength, self-confidence and the peace she found through meditative practices all came out in conversation."

Within her more recent synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – boldly labeled "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a artist attempting to transcend expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano resonances, reveals that that drive reached back decades. In place of a homogenous piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, distant church bells, creatures in enclosures, and tiny engines sparking to life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with monumental roars giving way to snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Listener Praise

Guitarist Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Vocalist 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 drawn to the intensity of her music, but was largely unaware of her dreamlike prepared piano until this release. Not long after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Now that seems completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Historical Influences

Williams’ prepared sounds have artistic antecedents: think of John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the groundbreaking approaches of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how effectively she blends these novel textures with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. Her musical speech hardly ever strays from that which she cultivated in a discography spanning more than 80 albums, meaning the new trippily tinted sounds are driven by the bubbling vitality of an improviser in total mastery. That's exhilarating material.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams had always tinkered with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she noted in an interview. She obtained her first home piano in 1954. On her blog, she told the story of her first "taking apart" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she wrote: Williams detached a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor next to her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she wrote.

Williams originally learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the classical repertoire 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: the next week, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Subsequently, Brubeck refer to 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, shows her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. However, despite her dedicated efforts to learn about the genre – first, to the hipper sounds of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before moving backwards to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she quickly became disenchanted with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up 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 low wages, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of securing work – and of a profit-driven sector riding on the coattails of financially strained musicians.

"I am continually disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she penned 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 rarely discussed her experiences as a trans individual. A commentator observed: "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 endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Williams’ career evolved into self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the active Bay Area scene, she lived in smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, making a home in Portland in 1991, and later going to a more remote location, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the great promise of the internet