🔗 Share this article

Flipping through the jazz records at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, collector Kye Potter found a well-used recording by musician Jessica Williams. It looked like the classic independent effort. "The labels had detached from the tape," he says. "It was copied at home, with photocopied notes, a touch of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector deeply fascinated by the American musical avant garde after John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt unusual from Williams, who was most famous for making vibrant jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a creative innovator – at her live shows, she required pianos lacking the lid to facilitate to get inside and strum the strings – it was a facet that infrequently appeared on her albums.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to see if any more recordings existed. She provided four recordings of altered piano from the mid 1980s – two concert recordings, two recorded in a studio. And though she had stepped away from public performance years earlier, she also enclosed some contemporary pieces. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – entire projects," Potter explains.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams throughout the pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was published 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 public about her hardships following spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "But I think her character, fortitude, assurance and the peace she found through meditative practices all were evident in conversation."

Within her more recent 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 musician seeking to transcend expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano echoes, shows that that drive extended back decades. Rather than a consistent piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, far-off chimes, creatures in enclosures, and small devices sparking to life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with massive roars collapsing into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Musician Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the intensity of her music, but knew little of her dreamlike prepared piano until this release. Not long after attending 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 link with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Artistic Forebears

These modified tones have artistic antecedents: reflect on John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the radical techniques of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how masterfully she fuses these innovative timbres with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The language rarely departs from that which she cultivated in a discography stretching to more than 80 albums, meaning the new trippily tinted sounds are driven by the fizzy energy of an performer in complete command. It’s electrifying music.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams consistently experimented with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she once explained. She obtained her first upright piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she recounted the tale of her first "dismantling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she noted: 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.

Early on, Williams trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for altering a section. But he saw her potential: the next week, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Brubeck would later call Williams "among the finest 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 immersion in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her long journeys to educate herself the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before working her way back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she soon grew disenchanted with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a strident, public critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of getting gigs – and of a commercial business profiting from the work of financially strained musicians.

"I am continually disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she stated in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, unflinching, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans woman. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her desired musical domain 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."

Forging an Autonomous Career

Williams’ career moved toward self-sufficiency. After time in the bustling 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 recognized early the great promise of the internet