🔗 Share this article

Perusing the jazz section at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, producer Kye Potter discovered a battered tape by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It looked like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had come off the tape," he notes. "It was home-dubbed, with photocopied notes, a little bit of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector keenly focused on the avant-garde movement after John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared atypical for Williams, who was primarily recognized for making vibrant jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the West Coast scene knew her as a creative innovator – during her performances, she asked for pianos lacking the lid to make it easier to get inside and play the strings directly – it was a aspect that infrequently appeared on her releases.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to inquire if additional recordings had been made. She provided four recordings of modified piano from the 1980s – two performance tapes, two studio creations. And though she had long since retired some time before, she also included some recent work. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – entire projects," Potter explains.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams throughout the pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was released in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter reveals. Williams had been public about her struggles after spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "Yet I feel her personality, strength, self-confidence and the calmness she found through meditative practices all came out 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 pianist trying to escape convention. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano echoes, demonstrates that that desire reached back decades. In place of a uniform piano sound, the instrument creates numerous distinct sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, remote carillons, creatures in enclosures, and tiny engines spluttering into life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with monumental roars dissolving into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker states 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 was largely unaware 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 remembers. "Now that seems completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Technical Precursors

These modified tones have historical forerunners: reflect on John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the groundbreaking approaches of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how masterfully she merges these innovative timbres with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The language hardly ever strays from that which she cultivated in a discography stretching to more than 80 albums, meaning the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are powered by the bubbling vitality of an artist in total mastery. This is electrifying music.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Throughout her life, Williams experimented with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she reportedly said. She received her first vertical piano in 1954. On her blog, she recounted the tale of her first "dismantling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she wrote: Williams took off a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor beside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she wrote.

Initially, Williams learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for altering a section. However, he detected her potential: the next week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

In time, Brubeck describe Williams "among the finest 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. However, despite her dedicated efforts to educate herself the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches 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 elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a forceful, open 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 getting gigs – and of a corporate industry benefiting from the efforts of artists in need.

"I am continually disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity 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. Likewise, the writing on her blog was eclectic, unflinching, expressly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans woman. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that pushed 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. Subsequent to a stint in the bustling Bay Area scene, she moved through 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 understood from the beginning the great promise of the internet