🔗 Share this article

Flipping through the jazz section at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, collector Kye Potter found a well-used recording by American pianist Jessica Williams. It appeared like the classic independent effort. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he recalls. "It was home-dubbed, with printed inserts, a dab of fluorescent marker to emphasize the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector particularly interested in the American musical avant garde following John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed out of character for Williams, who was most famous for making vibrant jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

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

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to see if any more recordings were available. She responded with four recordings of modified piano from the 1980s – two live, two studio creations. And though she had ceased playing publicly years earlier, she also shared some newer material. "She sent me around 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – complete albums," Potter recounts.

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. But Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter states. Williams had been vocal concerning her struggles after spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "Yet I feel her personality, strength, self-confidence and the serenity she found through her spiritual pursuits all were evident in conversation."

In later electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – defiantly tagged "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a musician attempting to break free of expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano reverberations, shows that that impulse reached back decades. Instead of a consistent piano sound, the piano creates a multitude of sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, far-off chimes, beasts in pens, and little machines coughing to start. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with colossal bellows collapsing into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Listener Praise

Guitarist Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the intensity of her music, but knew little of her dreamlike prepared piano until this release. Soon after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Technical Precursors

Her altered piano techniques have technical precursors: think of John Cage’s modified instruments, or the groundbreaking approaches of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how successfully she fuses these innovative timbres with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. Her musical speech rarely departs from that which she honed in a discography stretching to more than 80 albums, meaning the new trippily tinted sounds are powered by the effervescent force of an artist in complete command. It’s electrifying music.

A Constant Innovator

Throughout her life, Williams experimented with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she noted in an interview. She obtained her first upright piano in 1954. In her writings, she told the story of her first "dismantling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she noted: Williams detached a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor alongside her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she stated.

Initially, Williams studied 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 improvising a section. However, he detected her potential: a week later, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

In time, Brubeck call Williams "a top-tier pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was equally admiring. 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 dedicated efforts to educate herself the genre – first, to the more modern styles of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before working her way back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she rapidly felt disenchanted with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of getting gigs – and of a profit-driven sector benefiting from the efforts of struggling artists.

"I am continually disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she penned 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 rarely discussed her experiences as a trans individual. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her chosen artistic field for a period, imagine what kind of inhumane bullshit she must have faced as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

Forging an Autonomous Career

Her professional path evolved into self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the active Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, making a home in Portland in 1991, and later moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams understood from the beginning the great promise of the internet