🔗 Share this article

Flipping through the jazz records at a local record store a few years ago, artist Kye Potter found a worn cassette by musician Jessica Williams. It appeared like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he notes. "It was home-dubbed, with xeroxed liners, a dab of fluorescent marker to highlight the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector keenly focused on the U.S. experimental scene post John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed atypical for Williams, who was most famous for producing sparkling jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the California jazz community knew her as a sonic explorer – at her live shows, she asked for pianos with the top removed to facilitate to get inside and strum the strings – it was a facet that rarely made it on her records.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to inquire if additional recordings had been made. She sent back four recordings of modified piano from the mid-80s – two performance tapes, two made in the studio. And though she had stepped away from public performance some time before, she also enclosed some contemporary pieces. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synth tapes – full releases," says Potter.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams during the Covid pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was issued in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, during the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter reveals. Williams had been vocal concerning her struggles after 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 calmness she found through meditative practices all shone through in conversation."

Within her more recent 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 artist attempting to transcend convention. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano resonances, reveals that that drive stretched back decades. Instead of a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates a multitude of sonic associations: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, remote carillons, beasts in pens, and little machines coughing to start. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with monumental roars collapsing into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Musician Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the intensity of her music, but knew little of her otherworldly prepared piano before this release. Not long after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Today, that appears completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Artistic Forebears

Her altered piano techniques have artistic antecedents: consider John Cage’s modified instruments, or the innovative methods of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how masterfully she blends these novel textures with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The language rarely departs from that which she developed in a discography stretching to more than 80 albums, so that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are driven by the bubbling vitality of an artist in complete command. That's electrifying music.

A Constant Innovator

Throughout her life, Williams tinkered with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she once explained. She was given her first home piano in 1954. In her writings, she recounted the tale of her first "disassembling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she noted: Williams detached a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor beside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she stated.

Early on, Williams trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for embellishing a section. But he saw her potential: the following week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Brubeck would later call 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, exhibits her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. However, despite her extensive studies to learn about 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 disenchanted with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a strident, public critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "boys’ club," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of landing performances – and of a commercial business benefiting from the efforts 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. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, honest, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a transgender woman. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her preferred musical arena for a period, imagine what kind of cruel nonsense 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. 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 relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams understood from the beginning the huge potential of the internet