🔗 Share this article

Flipping through the jazz records at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, producer Kye Potter discovered a well-used recording by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It appeared like the classic independent effort. "The labels had detached from the tape," he recalls. "It was copied at home, with photocopied notes, a dab of fluorescent marker to accentuate the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector deeply fascinated by the U.S. experimental scene after John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt out of character for Williams, who was primarily recognized for creating sparkling jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the West Coast scene knew her as a creative innovator – for her concerts, she required pianos without the cover to facilitate to get inside and pluck the strings – it was a facet that rarely made it on her releases.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to ask if additional recordings had been made. She sent back four recordings of modified piano from the mid-80s – two live, two studio creations. Although she had ceased playing publicly previously, she also shared some recent work. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synth tapes – full releases," Potter explains.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams during the Covid pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was released in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. She was 73. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter states. Williams had been public about her struggles after spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "But I think her character, fortitude, assurance and the peace she found through meditative practices all came out in conversation."

In her subsequent 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 musician trying to break free of convention. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano echoes, demonstrates that that impulse stretched back decades. Rather than a homogenous piano sound, the piano creates a multitude of sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, far-off chimes, animals rattling around cages, and tiny engines spluttering into life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with colossal bellows dissolving into biting, staccato riffs.

Listener Praise

Guitarist Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the power of her music, but was largely unaware of her surreal-sounding prepared piano prior to this release. Not long after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Today, that appears completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Technical Precursors

Williams’ prepared sounds have historical forerunners: reflect on John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the radical techniques of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how effectively she merges these new sounds with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The language scarcely deviates from that which she developed in a discography spanning more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new trippily tinted sounds are driven by the bubbling vitality of an performer in complete command. That's exhilarating material.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams consistently experimented with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she noted in an interview. She obtained her first vertical piano in 1954. In her writings, she recounted the tale of her first "disassembling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she commented: Williams took off 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.

Williams originally learned 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. But he saw her potential: the next week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Subsequently, Brubeck describe Williams "among the finest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was similarly impressed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, shows her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. However, despite her dedicated efforts to study the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches 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.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "old boys' network," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of securing work – and of a commercial business benefiting from the efforts of artists in need.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she stated in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, honest, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a transgender woman. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her preferred musical arena for a period, imagine what kind of terrible treatment she must have suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

Her professional path moved toward 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 recognized early the huge potential of the internet