🔗 Share this article

Flipping through the jazz aisle at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, artist Kye Potter came across a well-used recording by musician Jessica Williams. It seemed like the classic independent effort. "The labels had detached from the tape," he notes. "It was personally duplicated, with printed inserts, a touch of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector particularly interested in the avant-garde movement following John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed atypical for Williams, who was best known for creating lively jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the West Coast scene knew her as a musical experimenter – at her live shows, she requested pianos lacking the lid to facilitate to get inside and play the strings directly – it was a dimension that rarely made it on her records.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to see if any more recordings had been made. She sent back four recordings of prepared piano from the mid 1980s – two concert recordings, two studio creations. Even though she had ceased playing publicly years earlier, she also included some contemporary pieces. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synth tapes – full releases," Potter recounts.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams throughout the pandemic to compile 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 dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter says. Williams had been public about her struggles following spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "However, I believe her character, fortitude, assurance and the peace she found through having a spiritual practice all shone through in conversation."

In later 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 convention. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano reverberations, shows that that drive extended back decades. Instead of a consistent piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic impressions: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, creatures in enclosures, and small devices sparking to life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with colossal bellows collapsing into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Guitarist Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the power of her music, but knew little of her dreamlike prepared piano until this release. Not long after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Artistic Forebears

Her altered piano techniques have artistic antecedents: consider John Cage’s modified instruments, or the innovative methods of American eccentric Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how successfully she merges these new sounds with her own soulful language at the keyboard. Her musical speech scarcely deviates from that which she honed in a discography extending to more than 80 albums, so that the new trippily tinted sounds are driven by the bubbling vitality of an artist in full control. It’s electrifying music.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams had always explored the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she noted in an interview. She was given her first vertical piano in 1954. In her writings, she shared the anecdote of her first "taking apart" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she noted: Williams detached a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor beside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she wrote.

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

Jazz World Disillusionment

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, exhibits her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her dedicated efforts to study the genre – first, to the more modern styles of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before moving backwards to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she rapidly felt disappointed with the jazz world.

After moving 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 emerged as a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "old boys' network," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of securing work – and of a commercial business benefiting from the efforts of struggling artists.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she penned in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was eclectic, direct, expressly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans woman. A commentator observed: "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 suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

The artist's trajectory arced towards self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the active Bay Area scene, she relocated to smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, moving to Portland in 1991, and later moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams understood from the beginning the immense possibilities of the internet