🔗 Share this article

While browsing the jazz aisle at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, producer Kye Potter found a battered tape by American pianist Jessica Williams. It appeared like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had come off the tape," he notes. "It was copied at home, with photocopied notes, a dab of fluorescent marker to accentuate the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector keenly focused on the American musical avant garde after John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared out of character for Williams, who was primarily recognized for making lively jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the California jazz community knew her as a sonic explorer – at her live shows, she asked for pianos lacking the lid to make it easier to reach inside and pluck the strings – it was a facet that seldom found its way on her releases.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to ask if further recordings had been made. She sent back four recordings of prepared piano from the 1980s – two performance tapes, two studio creations. Even though she had long since retired years earlier, she also shared some newer material. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – complete albums," Potter recounts.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams in the pandemic era to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was published in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter says. Williams had been open regarding her hardships after spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "Yet I feel her personality, strength, self-confidence and the peace she found through her spiritual pursuits all were evident in conversation."

In later 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 artist attempting to escape expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano resonances, demonstrates that that desire stretched back decades. Instead of a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, remote carillons, beasts in pens, and tiny engines sparking to life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with monumental roars collapsing into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Musician Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the force of her music, but knew little of her otherworldly prepared piano prior to this release. Shortly after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Artistic Forebears

These modified tones have technical precursors: consider John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the radical techniques of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how masterfully she fuses these innovative timbres with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The language rarely departs from that which she developed in a discography extending to more than 80 albums, meaning the new trippily tinted sounds are driven by the effervescent force of an artist in complete command. It’s exhilarating material.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams had always tinkered with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she noted in an interview. She was given her first upright piano in 1954. On her blog, she shared the anecdote of her first "taking apart" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she commented: Williams removed a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor beside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she explained.

Early on, Williams studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she brought 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.

Jazz World Disillusionment

In time, Brubeck 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, displays her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. However, despite her extensive studies to educate herself the genre – first, to the hipper sounds of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before moving backwards to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she soon grew disillusioned with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a strident, public critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of landing performances – and of a corporate industry riding on the coattails of struggling artists.

"I am continually disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she wrote in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, direct, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans individual. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that pushed 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."

A Journey of Independence

Her professional path moved toward self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the bustling Bay Area scene, she lived in smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, making a home in Portland in 1991, and later going to a more remote location, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the immense possibilities of the internet