🔗 Share this article

While browsing the jazz section at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, artist Kye Potter discovered a well-used recording by American pianist Jessica Williams. It seemed like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had come off the tape," he says. "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."

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

If the California jazz community knew her as a creative innovator – for her concerts, she requested pianos with the top removed to facilitate to reach inside and strum the strings – it was a facet that rarely made it on her releases.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to ask if further recordings had been made. She sent back four recordings of altered piano from the mid-80s – two performance tapes, two recorded in a studio. Even though she had ceased playing publicly some time before, she also shared some recent work. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – entire projects," says Potter.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams throughout the pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was issued in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, part way through the project. She was 73. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter says. Williams had been vocal concerning her hardships following spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "However, I believe her personality, strength, self-confidence and the calmness she found through meditative practices all came out in conversation."

Within her more recent synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – boldly labeled "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a musician trying to escape tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano echoes, shows that that drive extended back decades. Rather than a uniform piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic evocations: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, far-off chimes, creatures in enclosures, and tiny engines coughing to start. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with colossal bellows giving way to growling, sharply accented riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Guitarist Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Vocalist 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 intensity of her music, but knew little of her otherworldly prepared piano until this release. Soon after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Now that seems completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Technical Precursors

These modified tones have historical forerunners: reflect on John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the groundbreaking approaches of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how successfully she fuses these innovative timbres with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. Her musical speech rarely departs from that which she cultivated in a catalog extending to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are fueled by the fizzy energy of an performer in total mastery. This is electrifying music.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams had always explored the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she reportedly said. She obtained her first vertical piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she told the story of her first "dismantling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she commented: Williams took off a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor alongside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she wrote.

Williams originally studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded 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.

Frustration with the Scene

Subsequently, Brubeck refer to Williams "one of the greatest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was just as awed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, displays her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. However, despite her dedicated efforts to educate herself the genre – first, to the more modern styles of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before tracing a path back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she rapidly felt disenchanted with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "boys’ club," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of securing work – and of a corporate industry benefiting from the efforts of artists in need.

"I am continually disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she penned in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was eclectic, unflinching, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans woman. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her preferred musical arena for a period, imagine what kind of cruel nonsense she must have endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

Forging an Autonomous Career

Her professional path moved toward self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the bustling Bay Area scene, she relocated to smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, moving to Portland in 1991, and later moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams saw early on the immense possibilities of the internet