🔗 Share this article

Perusing the jazz records at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, collector Kye Potter found a worn cassette by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It looked like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he says. "It was copied at home, with printed inserts, a little bit of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector particularly interested in the American musical avant garde after John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared unusual from Williams, who was most famous for producing sparkling jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the West Coast scene knew her as a musical experimenter – for her concerts, she requested pianos with the top removed to make it easier to get inside and pluck the strings – it was a aspect that rarely made it on her records.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to ask if additional recordings had been made. She provided four recordings of altered piano from the mid-80s – two concert recordings, two studio creations. Although she had long since retired some time before, she also shared some recent work. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synth tapes – complete albums," says Potter.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams throughout the pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was issued in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter reveals. Williams had been public about her struggles following spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "However, I believe her character, fortitude, assurance and the serenity she found through her spiritual pursuits all were evident in conversation."

In later synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – explicitly categorized "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a pianist attempting to break free of convention. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano reverberations, reveals that that desire reached back decades. Rather than a uniform piano sound, the piano creates numerous distinct sonic associations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, beasts in pens, and little machines sparking to life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with colossal bellows giving way to growling, sharply accented riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" 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 attracted to the power of her music, but was largely unaware of her dreamlike prepared piano until this release. Not long after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Now that seems completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Artistic Forebears

These modified tones have artistic antecedents: reflect on John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the groundbreaking approaches of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how successfully she merges these new sounds with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The language rarely departs from that which she developed in a discography stretching to more than 80 albums, meaning the new psychedelically coloured sounds are driven by the fizzy energy of an improviser in total mastery. This is thrilling stuff.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Throughout her life, Williams tinkered with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she once explained. She received her first upright piano in 1954. On her blog, she recounted the tale of her first "dismantling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she commented: Williams took off a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor alongside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she explained.

Early on, Williams learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for altering 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

In time, Brubeck describe Williams "a top-tier pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was similarly impressed. 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 extensive studies to learn about the genre – first, to the hipper sounds of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before working her way back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she quickly became disillusioned with the jazz world.

Upon relocating 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 strident, public critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "old boys' network," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of getting gigs – and of a profit-driven sector benefiting from the efforts of artists in need.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she penned in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was eclectic, direct, expressly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans individual. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that drove 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 evolved into self-sufficiency. Following a period in the bustling Bay Area scene, she relocated to smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling in Portland in 1991, and later moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams understood from the beginning the huge potential of the internet