🔗 Share this article

While browsing the jazz aisle at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, producer Kye Potter discovered a well-used recording by American pianist Jessica Williams. It looked like the classic independent effort. "The labels had detached from the tape," he recalls. "It was copied at home, with photocopied notes, a touch of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector particularly interested in the avant-garde movement after John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed atypical for Williams, who was primarily recognized for creating sparkling jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a creative innovator – at her live shows, she required pianos without the cover to facilitate to get inside and play the strings directly – it was a facet that infrequently appeared on her releases.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to inquire if any more recordings existed. She provided four recordings of altered piano from the 1980s – two concert recordings, two studio creations. Although she had long since retired years earlier, she also enclosed 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 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, midway through the project. She was 73. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter says. Williams had been vocal concerning her struggles after spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "But I think her character, fortitude, assurance and the calmness she found through her spiritual pursuits all came out in conversation."

In her subsequent 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 seeking to transcend tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano echoes, shows that that impulse reached back decades. In place of a consistent piano sound, the piano creates numerous distinct sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, remote carillons, animals rattling around cages, and little machines spluttering into life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with monumental roars giving way to biting, staccato riffs.

Listener Praise

Guitarist Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the force of her music, but had scant knowledge of her otherworldly prepared piano prior to this release. Shortly after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Today, that appears completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Artistic Forebears

These modified tones have artistic antecedents: consider John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the radical techniques of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how effectively she merges these innovative timbres with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. Her musical speech scarcely deviates from that which she honed in a catalog extending to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new trippily tinted sounds are fueled by the bubbling vitality of an performer in total mastery. That's exhilarating material.

A Constant Innovator

Williams had always experimented with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she reportedly said. She received her first vertical piano in 1954. On her blog, she told the story of her first "dismantling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she noted: Williams detached a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor beside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she wrote.

Initially, Williams studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for improvising a section. But he saw her potential: a week later, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

In time, Brubeck describe Williams "a top-tier 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 signature clever pianistic wit. Yet, despite her dedicated efforts 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 rapidly felt disillusioned with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the senior musician'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 "male-dominated sphere," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of landing performances – and of a profit-driven sector riding on the coattails of struggling artists.

"I am continually disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of core values," she wrote in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was eclectic, direct, openly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans woman. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her chosen artistic field 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."

A Journey of Independence

Her professional path arced towards self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she relocated to smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, making a home in Portland in 1991, and later moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams understood from the beginning the immense possibilities of the internet