🔗 Share this article

Perusing the jazz aisle at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, producer Kye Potter came across a battered tape by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It seemed like the classic independent effort. "The labels had detached from the tape," he recalls. "It was personally duplicated, with photocopied notes, a touch of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector keenly focused on the U.S. experimental scene after John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed atypical for Williams, who was primarily recognized for producing lively jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the California jazz community knew her as a musical experimenter – for her concerts, she asked for pianos lacking the lid to allow her to reach inside and strum the strings – it was a dimension that rarely made it 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 any more recordings were available. She sent back four recordings of prepared piano from the mid-80s – two live, two recorded in a studio. Even though she had long since retired years earlier, she also included some recent work. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – entire projects," says Potter.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams in the pandemic era to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was released in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, during the project. She was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter says. Williams had been public about her hardships after spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "Yet I feel her character, fortitude, assurance and the serenity she found through her spiritual pursuits all came out in conversation."

Within her more recent 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 trying to transcend tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano resonances, demonstrates that that desire reached back decades. Rather than a consistent piano sound, the piano creates a multitude of sonic impressions: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, distant church bells, beasts in pens, and small devices sparking to life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with colossal bellows collapsing into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Guitarist Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the force of her music, but knew little of her otherworldly prepared piano before this release. Not long after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the abstract vocalizations 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."

Artistic Forebears

These modified tones have technical precursors: consider John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the radical techniques of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how masterfully she fuses these new sounds with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The language hardly ever strays from that which she honed in a body of work spanning more than 80 albums, so that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are fueled by the fizzy energy of an artist in full control. That's exhilarating material.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Throughout her life, Williams tinkered with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she reportedly said. She was given her first vertical piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she told the story of her first "taking apart" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she noted: Williams took off a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor alongside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she explained.

Early on, Williams learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for improvising a section. But he saw her potential: the next week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered 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 equally admiring. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, exhibits her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her dedicated efforts to educate herself the genre – first, to the hipper sounds of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before tracing a path back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she quickly became disenchanted with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a strident, public critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of securing work – and of a corporate industry benefiting from the efforts of financially strained musicians.

"I am continually disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she stated in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, unflinching, expressly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans woman. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that drove 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."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Williams’ career arced towards self-sufficiency. After time in the active Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling in Portland in 1991, and later relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the great promise of the internet