🔗 Share this article

While browsing the jazz aisle at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, collector Kye Potter came across a battered tape by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It appeared like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he says. "It was home-dubbed, with xeroxed liners, a touch of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector deeply fascinated by the U.S. experimental scene after John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt out of character for Williams, who was best known for making vibrant jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the California jazz community knew her as a sonic explorer – at her live shows, she asked for pianos with the top removed to make it easier to get inside and strum the strings – it was a facet that rarely made it on her releases.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to inquire if any more recordings were available. She sent back four recordings of modified piano from the mid 1980s – two live, two made in the studio. Although she had stepped away from public performance years earlier, she also enclosed some contemporary pieces. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – entire projects," Potter explains.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams during the Covid pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was issued in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, during the project. She was 73. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter says. Williams had been vocal concerning her hardships following spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "Yet I feel her character, fortitude, assurance and the peace she found through meditative practices all came out in conversation."

In her subsequent 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 artist trying to transcend expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano echoes, demonstrates that that drive stretched back decades. Instead of a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic associations: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, remote carillons, animals rattling around cages, and tiny engines coughing to start. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with massive roars collapsing into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the intensity of her music, but was largely unaware of her otherworldly prepared piano before this release. Not long after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Today, that appears completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Technical Precursors

These modified tones have historical forerunners: reflect on John Cage’s modified instruments, or the radical techniques of American eccentric Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how effectively she blends these novel textures with her own soulful language at the keyboard. Her musical speech hardly ever strays from that which she honed in a body of work stretching to more than 80 albums, so that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are powered by the bubbling vitality of an performer in total mastery. This is thrilling stuff.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Throughout her life, Williams explored the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she noted in an interview. She obtained her first home piano in 1954. In her writings, she told the story of her first "dismantling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she wrote: Williams detached a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor beside her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she explained.

Williams originally studied 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 improvising a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the following week, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Subsequently, Brubeck call Williams "one of the greatest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was similarly impressed. 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 study the genre – first, to the more modern styles of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before working her way back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she rapidly felt disillusioned 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 strident, public critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "old boys' network," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of landing performances – and of a corporate industry profiting from the work of artists in need.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she penned in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was eclectic, unflinching, expressly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a transgender woman. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her preferred musical arena for a period, imagine what kind of terrible treatment she must have faced as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

The artist's trajectory moved toward self-sufficiency. Following a period in the active 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 saw early on the great promise of the internet