🔗 Share this article

Perusing the jazz records at a local record store a few years ago, artist Kye Potter found a worn cassette by musician Jessica Williams. It seemed like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he notes. "It was personally duplicated, with printed inserts, a dab of fluorescent marker to highlight 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 captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt out of character for Williams, who was best known for creating lively jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the West Coast scene knew her as a creative innovator – during her performances, she requested pianos without the cover to facilitate to access the interior and strum the strings – it was a dimension that rarely made it on her albums.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to inquire if further recordings were available. She sent back four recordings of modified piano from the 1980s – two concert recordings, two recorded in a studio. And though she had long since retired some time before, she also enclosed some contemporary pieces. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – full releases," Potter explains.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams throughout the pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was published 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 says. Williams had been vocal concerning her hardships following spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "But I think her personality, strength, self-confidence and the calmness she found through having a spiritual practice all were evident 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 pianist seeking to escape expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano echoes, reveals that that desire reached back decades. Rather than a consistent piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, far-off chimes, beasts in pens, and tiny engines sparking to life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with colossal bellows collapsing into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Musician Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the force of her music, but was largely unaware of her otherworldly prepared piano prior to this release. Not long after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Now that seems completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Historical Influences

Williams’ prepared sounds have artistic antecedents: consider John Cage’s modified instruments, or the groundbreaking approaches of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how successfully she merges these new sounds with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The language scarcely deviates from that which she developed in a body of work extending to more than 80 albums, so that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are fueled by the effervescent force of an performer in total mastery. That's thrilling stuff.

A Constant Innovator

Williams had always tinkered with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she once explained. She was given her first upright piano in 1954. On her blog, she told the story of her first "dismantling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she commented: Williams removed a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor next to her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she stated.

Williams originally trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for embellishing 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

Brubeck would later refer to 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, exhibits her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. However, despite her extensive studies to learn about the genre – first, to the more modern styles of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before tracing a path back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she rapidly felt disenchanted with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "old boys' network," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of getting gigs – and of a commercial business benefiting from the efforts of artists in need.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of core values," she stated in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, 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 inhumane bullshit she must have suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

The artist's trajectory arced towards self-sufficiency. After time in the bustling Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling in Portland in 1991, and later going to a more remote location, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the huge potential of the internet