🔗 Share this article

Flipping through the jazz section at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, collector Kye Potter came across a battered tape by American pianist Jessica Williams. It looked like the classic independent effort. "The labels had detached from the tape," he says. "It was home-dubbed, with photocopied notes, a touch of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector keenly focused on the avant-garde movement post John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared out of character for Williams, who was primarily recognized for producing vibrant jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the California jazz community knew her as a creative innovator – for her concerts, she asked for pianos with the top removed to make it easier to access the interior and strum the strings – it was a aspect that seldom found its way on her albums.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to inquire if further recordings existed. She sent back four recordings of altered piano from the mid-80s – two performance tapes, two studio creations. And though she had stepped away from public performance previously, she also shared some newer material. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synth tapes – complete albums," says Potter.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams in the pandemic era to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was issued in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter reveals. Williams had been vocal concerning her hardships after spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "However, I believe her character, fortitude, assurance and the peace she found through meditative practices all were evident in conversation."

In later synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – defiantly tagged "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a pianist seeking to transcend tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano resonances, demonstrates that that impulse extended back decades. Instead of a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates numerous distinct sonic associations: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, far-off chimes, animals rattling around cages, and small devices spluttering into life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with monumental roars dissolving into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Listener Praise

Guitarist Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has partnered 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 was largely unaware of her otherworldly prepared piano prior to this release. Shortly after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Historical Influences

Her altered piano techniques have technical precursors: consider John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the innovative methods of American eccentric Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how successfully she fuses these innovative timbres with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The stylistic approach rarely departs from that which she cultivated in a catalog spanning more than 80 albums, meaning the new trippily tinted sounds are driven by the bubbling vitality of an performer in total mastery. It’s exhilarating material.

A Constant Innovator

Williams had always experimented with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she reportedly said. She was given her first vertical piano in 1954. On her blog, she shared the anecdote of her first "dismantling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she wrote: Williams removed a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor next to her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she wrote.

Williams originally 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 reprimanded her for improvising a section. But he saw her potential: the following week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

In time, Brubeck call Williams "one of the greatest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was similarly impressed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, shows her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Yet, despite her long journeys to learn about 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 quickly became disappointed with the jazz world.

Following her relocation 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 became a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "boys’ club," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of getting gigs – and of a commercial business profiting from the work of artists in need.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of core values," she wrote in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, honest, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a transgender woman. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her chosen artistic field for a period, imagine what kind of cruel nonsense she must have suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

The artist's trajectory arced towards self-sufficiency. Following a period in the bustling Bay Area scene, she moved through 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 understood from the beginning the great promise of the internet