🔗 Share this article

While browsing the jazz aisle at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, artist Kye Potter found a well-used recording by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It seemed like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had come off the tape," he says. "It was home-dubbed, with printed inserts, a dab of fluorescent marker to highlight the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector keenly focused on the avant-garde movement following John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed unusual from Williams, who was primarily recognized for creating lively jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the California jazz community knew her as a sonic explorer – for her concerts, she required pianos without the cover to allow her to reach inside and strum the strings – it was a aspect that infrequently appeared on her releases.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to see if additional recordings had been made. She responded with four recordings of altered piano from the mid 1980s – two live, two recorded in a studio. Although she had long since retired previously, she also included some contemporary pieces. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – full releases," Potter recounts.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams during the Covid pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions 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 reveals. Williams had been public about 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 calmness she found through meditative practices all came out in conversation."

In her subsequent electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – boldly labeled "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a pianist attempting to escape convention. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano reverberations, demonstrates that that impulse reached back decades. Rather than a uniform piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, remote carillons, creatures in enclosures, and small devices coughing to start. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with massive roars collapsing into biting, staccato riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the force of her music, but was largely unaware of her otherworldly prepared piano before this release. Soon after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Artistic Forebears

Williams’ prepared sounds have technical precursors: reflect on John Cage’s modified instruments, or the groundbreaking approaches of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how masterfully she merges these innovative timbres with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The language scarcely deviates from that which she honed in a body of work stretching to more than 80 albums, so that the new trippily tinted sounds are powered by the fizzy energy of an improviser in full control. That's electrifying music.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams consistently explored the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she reportedly said. She was given her first vertical piano in 1954. On her blog, she shared the anecdote of her first "taking apart" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she wrote: Williams removed a panel from under 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 learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for altering a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the next week, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Subsequently, Brubeck call Williams "one of the greatest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was similarly impressed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, displays her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her long journeys to learn about the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before working her way back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she quickly became disillusioned with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a strident, public critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of getting gigs – and of a profit-driven sector profiting from the work of struggling artists.

"I am continually disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of core values," she stated in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, honest, openly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a transgender woman. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her chosen artistic field for a period, imagine what kind of cruel nonsense she must have endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

The artist's trajectory evolved into self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the bustling Bay Area scene, she relocated to smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, making a home in Portland in 1991, and later going to a more remote location, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams understood from the beginning the great promise of the internet