🔗 Share this article

Perusing the jazz aisle at a local record store a few years ago, producer Kye Potter came across a well-used recording by American pianist Jessica Williams. It looked like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he says. "It was home-dubbed, with printed inserts, a touch of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector keenly focused on the American musical avant garde following John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed out of character for Williams, who was best known for producing lively jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a sonic explorer – for her concerts, she required pianos without the cover to make it easier to get inside and pluck the strings – it was a aspect that rarely made it on her releases.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to see if further recordings existed. She provided four recordings of prepared piano from the 1980s – two concert recordings, two made in the studio. Although she had long since retired previously, she also enclosed some contemporary pieces. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synth tapes – complete albums," Potter recounts.

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. However, Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter states. Williams had been vocal concerning her struggles following spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "However, I believe her character, fortitude, assurance and the peace she found through meditative practices all came out in conversation."

In her subsequent synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – explicitly categorized "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a artist seeking to escape tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano echoes, shows that that drive stretched back decades. Rather than a uniform piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic evocations: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, remote carillons, beasts in pens, and tiny engines coughing to start. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with massive roars giving way to biting, staccato riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. 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 force of her music, but had scant knowledge of her dreamlike prepared piano prior to this release. Shortly after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Historical Influences

Williams’ prepared sounds have technical precursors: think of John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the groundbreaking approaches of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how successfully she merges these novel textures with her own soulful language at the keyboard. Her musical speech scarcely deviates from that which she cultivated in a catalog extending to more than 80 albums, so that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are fueled by the fizzy energy of an artist in total mastery. This is thrilling stuff.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams consistently explored the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she once explained. She was given her first upright piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she told the story of her first "dismantling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she wrote: Williams detached a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor next to her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she explained.

Initially, Williams trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for altering a section. Yet he recognized her potential: a week later, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

In time, 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, displays her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her long journeys 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 rapidly felt disappointed with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of securing work – and of a commercial business profiting from the work of financially strained musicians.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of core values," she stated in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was eclectic, unflinching, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans woman. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her desired musical domain for a period, imagine what kind of inhumane bullshit she must have faced as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Her professional path moved toward self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she lived in 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 understood from the beginning the immense possibilities of the internet