🔗 Share this article

Flipping through the jazz records at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, artist Kye Potter discovered a well-used recording by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It appeared like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had come off the tape," he notes. "It was copied at home, with photocopied notes, a touch of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector particularly interested in the avant-garde movement following John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt out of character for Williams, who was best known for making lively jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the California jazz community knew her as a creative innovator – during her performances, she required pianos with the top removed to allow her to get inside and pluck the strings – it was a aspect that rarely made it on her records.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to see if any more recordings were available. She sent back four recordings of altered piano from the mid 1980s – two concert recordings, two made in the studio. Even though she had ceased playing publicly previously, she also shared some recent work. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synth tapes – entire projects," says Potter.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams during the Covid pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was published in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. She was 73. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter states. Williams had been vocal concerning her difficulties following 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 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 attempting to transcend convention. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano reverberations, demonstrates that that desire extended back decades. Rather than a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates numerous distinct sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, far-off chimes, creatures in enclosures, and tiny engines spluttering into life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with colossal bellows dissolving into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Listener Praise

Musician Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the power of her music, but knew little of her surreal-sounding prepared piano prior to this release. Shortly after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Today, that appears completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Technical Precursors

These modified tones have artistic antecedents: reflect on John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the radical techniques of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how successfully she fuses these innovative timbres with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. Her musical speech hardly ever strays from that which she honed in a discography stretching to more than 80 albums, meaning the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are driven by the bubbling vitality of an artist in total mastery. That's electrifying music.

A Constant Innovator

Throughout her life, Williams tinkered with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she noted in an interview. She was given her first home piano in 1954. In her writings, she told the story of her first "dismantling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she noted: Williams removed a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor beside her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she explained.

Williams originally trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for altering a section. But he saw her potential: the next week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Subsequently, Brubeck call Williams "a top-tier 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 knowledge of jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Yet, despite her extensive studies to study 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 rapidly felt disappointed with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "old boys' network," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of securing work – and of a profit-driven sector profiting from the work of struggling artists.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she stated in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, honest, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans individual. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her chosen artistic field for a period, imagine what kind of cruel nonsense she must have faced as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

Forging an Autonomous Career

Williams’ career moved toward self-sufficiency. After time in the bustling Bay Area scene, she relocated to 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 saw early on the huge potential of the internet