🔗 Share this article

Flipping through the jazz section at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, collector Kye Potter discovered a battered tape by American pianist Jessica Williams. It appeared like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had detached from the tape," he says. "It was personally duplicated, with photocopied notes, a dab of fluorescent marker to emphasize the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector keenly focused on the American musical avant garde post 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 conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the California jazz community knew her as a musical experimenter – for her concerts, she asked for pianos without the cover to allow her to access the interior and play the strings directly – it was a facet that infrequently appeared on her records.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to see if further recordings were available. She responded with four recordings of modified piano from the 1980s – two live, two made in the studio. Although she had stepped away from public performance previously, she also included some recent work. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – complete albums," Potter explains.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams in the pandemic era to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was issued in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, midway through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter states. Williams had been public about her difficulties after spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "But I think her personality, strength, self-confidence and the calmness she found through her spiritual pursuits all were evident in conversation."

In later electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – boldly labeled "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a artist attempting to break free of convention. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano resonances, shows that that desire stretched back decades. In place of a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates numerous distinct sonic impressions: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, distant church bells, beasts in pens, and tiny engines coughing to start. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with massive roars giving way to snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Listener Praise

Musician Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the power of her music, but was largely unaware of her dreamlike prepared piano prior to this release. Shortly after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Now that seems completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Artistic Forebears

Her altered piano techniques have technical precursors: think of John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the innovative methods of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how effectively she merges these novel textures with her own soulful language at the keyboard. Her musical speech rarely departs from that which she cultivated in a discography spanning more than 80 albums, meaning the new trippily tinted sounds are driven by the fizzy energy of an artist in full control. That's electrifying music.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams had always experimented with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she reportedly said. She was given her first upright piano in 1954. On her blog, she recounted the tale of her first "disassembling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she noted: Williams detached a panel from under 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 stated.

Williams originally learned 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 reprimanded her for improvising a section. But he saw her potential: the next week, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

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, shows her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. However, despite her long journeys to study 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.

Following her relocation 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 became a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "boys’ club," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of getting gigs – and of a commercial business riding on the coattails of struggling artists.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she stated in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, unflinching, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she infrequently addressed 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 endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

The artist's trajectory evolved into self-sufficiency. Following a period in the bustling Bay Area scene, she lived in 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 recognized early the great promise of the internet