🔗 Share this article

While browsing the jazz aisle at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, producer Kye Potter found a battered tape by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It appeared like the classic independent effort. "The labels had detached from the tape," he recalls. "It was copied at home, with xeroxed liners, a little bit of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector particularly interested in the American musical avant garde post John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt out of character for Williams, who was primarily recognized for producing lively jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the West Coast scene knew her as a sonic explorer – at her live shows, she requested pianos with the top removed to allow her to get inside and play the strings directly – it was a dimension that infrequently appeared on her records.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to inquire if any more recordings had been made. She provided four recordings of prepared piano from the 1980s – two concert recordings, two made in the studio. And though she had stepped away from public performance previously, she also shared some newer material. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synth tapes – entire projects," Potter explains.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams throughout the pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was published in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter reveals. Williams had been open regarding her difficulties following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "However, I believe her character, fortitude, assurance and the peace she found through having a spiritual practice all were evident in conversation."

In her subsequent 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 break free of expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano resonances, reveals that that desire extended back decades. Rather than a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates a multitude of sonic associations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, remote carillons, beasts in pens, and little machines coughing to start. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with monumental roars dissolving into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the power of her music, but had scant knowledge of her surreal-sounding prepared piano until this release. Soon after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Today, that appears completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Historical Influences

Her altered piano techniques have artistic antecedents: consider John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the radical techniques of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how successfully she fuses these novel textures with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The language hardly ever strays from that which she developed in a catalog extending to more than 80 albums, meaning the new psychedelically coloured sounds are powered by the effervescent force of an artist in total mastery. That's thrilling stuff.

A Constant Innovator

Williams had always explored the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she reportedly said. She was given her first upright piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she shared the anecdote of her first "taking apart" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she commented: 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 stated.

Early on, Williams learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for embellishing a section. However, he detected her potential: a week later, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

In time, Brubeck refer to Williams "a top-tier 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 immersion in jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. Yet, despite her extensive studies to learn about 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 disenchanted with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered 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 meagre pay, the jazz "old boys' network," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of landing performances – and of a commercial business riding on the coattails of artists in need.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of core values," she penned in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was eclectic, 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 inhumane bullshit she must have suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

The artist's trajectory arced towards self-sufficiency. Following a period in the bustling Bay Area scene, she lived in smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, moving to Portland in 1991, and later going to a more remote location, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the huge potential of the internet