🔗 Share this article

Perusing the jazz aisle at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, producer Kye Potter found a battered tape by musician Jessica Williams. It seemed like the classic independent effort. "The labels had come off the tape," he says. "It was copied at home, with printed inserts, a little bit of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector keenly focused on the American musical avant garde post John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared unusual from Williams, who was best known for creating sparkling jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the California jazz community knew her as a musical experimenter – at her live shows, she required pianos lacking the lid to make it easier to get inside and pluck the strings – it was a aspect that seldom found its way on her albums.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to ask if additional recordings existed. She sent back four recordings of modified piano from the mid-80s – two concert recordings, two made in the studio. Even though she had long since retired some time before, she also included some newer material. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – entire projects," Potter explains.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams during the Covid pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was released in late 2025. But 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 vocal concerning her struggles after spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "However, I believe her personality, strength, self-confidence and the serenity she found through meditative practices all came out in conversation."

In later electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – explicitly categorized "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a musician seeking to transcend tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano resonances, reveals that that drive stretched back decades. In place of a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic associations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, remote carillons, beasts in pens, and tiny engines coughing to start. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with massive roars giving way to growling, sharply accented riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Musician Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the intensity of her music, but had scant knowledge of her dreamlike prepared piano prior to this release. Not long after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Today, that appears completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Historical Influences

These modified tones have artistic antecedents: reflect on John Cage’s modified instruments, or the radical techniques of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how masterfully she merges these innovative timbres with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The stylistic approach hardly ever strays from that which she developed in a catalog stretching to more than 80 albums, meaning the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are driven by the fizzy energy of an performer in total mastery. That's exhilarating material.

A Constant Innovator

Williams had always experimented with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she noted in an interview. She received her first home piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she recounted the tale of her first "taking apart" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she commented: Williams detached a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor beside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she stated.

Initially, Williams studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for altering a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the following week, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

In time, Brubeck call 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, exhibits her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. Yet, despite her dedicated efforts 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 quickly became disillusioned with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "old boys' network," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of getting gigs – and of a profit-driven sector benefiting from the efforts of financially strained musicians.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she wrote in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was eclectic, unflinching, openly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a transgender woman. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her preferred musical arena for a period, imagine what kind of inhumane bullshit she must have endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

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