🔗 Share this article

While browsing the jazz aisle at a local record store a few years ago, collector Kye Potter found a worn cassette by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It appeared like the classic independent effort. "The labels had come off the tape," he notes. "It was copied at home, with photocopied notes, a little bit of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector deeply fascinated by the avant-garde movement after John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared unusual from Williams, who was best known for producing lively jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the California jazz community knew her as a sonic explorer – for her concerts, she requested pianos with the top removed to allow her to access the interior and play the strings directly – it was a facet 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 inquire if any more recordings existed. She sent back four recordings of modified piano from the mid-80s – two performance tapes, two recorded in a studio. Even though she had ceased playing publicly years earlier, she also enclosed some newer material. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – complete albums," Potter explains.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams during the Covid pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was published in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter says. Williams had been vocal concerning her struggles following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "Yet I feel her personality, strength, self-confidence and the peace she found through meditative practices all came out in conversation."

Within her more recent 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 musician attempting to break free of convention. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano echoes, reveals that that drive reached back decades. Instead of a uniform piano sound, the piano creates numerous distinct sonic impressions: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, remote carillons, animals rattling around cages, and small devices sparking to life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with monumental roars collapsing into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Musician Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Composer 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 intensity of her music, but was largely unaware of her otherworldly prepared piano until this release. Shortly after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Now that seems completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Artistic Forebears

Williams’ prepared sounds have technical precursors: think of John Cage’s modified instruments, or the radical techniques of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how successfully she merges these new sounds with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The stylistic approach scarcely deviates from that which she honed in a body of work spanning more than 80 albums, so that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are fueled by the effervescent force of an artist in total mastery. This is exhilarating material.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Throughout her life, Williams tinkered with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she reportedly said. She was given her first home piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she shared the anecdote of her first "taking apart" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she noted: Williams took off a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor alongside her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she explained.

Early on, Williams trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for improvising a section. But he saw her potential: a week later, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Brubeck would later describe 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, displays her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Yet, 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 disillusioned with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of securing work – and of a corporate industry profiting from the work of financially strained musicians.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she stated in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was eclectic, honest, expressly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans individual. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that chased 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."

A Journey of Independence

Her professional path arced towards self-sufficiency. After time in the bustling Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, making a home in Portland in 1991, and later relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the great promise of the internet