🔗 Share this article

Perusing the jazz section at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, collector Kye Potter came across a worn cassette by musician Jessica Williams. It seemed like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had come off the tape," he notes. "It was personally duplicated, with printed inserts, a touch of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector keenly focused on the American musical avant garde after John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed out of character for Williams, who was primarily recognized for producing lively jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the California jazz community knew her as a creative innovator – at her live shows, she asked for pianos without the cover to make it easier to reach inside and strum the strings – it was a aspect that seldom found its way on her records.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to ask if any more recordings had been made. She responded with four recordings of modified piano from the mid-80s – two concert recordings, two made in the studio. And though she had ceased playing publicly some time before, she also included some newer material. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synth tapes – entire projects," Potter recounts.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams in the pandemic era to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was issued in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter says. Williams had been vocal concerning her hardships after 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 calmness she found through meditative practices all came out in conversation."

In later 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 intriguingly altered piano resonances, shows that that impulse stretched back decades. Instead of a uniform piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic evocations: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, remote carillons, creatures in enclosures, and small devices coughing to start. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with massive roars giving way to growling, sharply accented riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Musician Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the force of her music, but had scant knowledge of her surreal-sounding prepared piano prior to this release. Shortly 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 known to me then."

Artistic Forebears

Williams’ prepared sounds have technical precursors: consider John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the radical techniques of American eccentric Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how masterfully she fuses these new sounds with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The stylistic approach hardly ever strays from that which she cultivated in a discography extending to more than 80 albums, so that the new trippily tinted sounds are fueled by the fizzy energy of an improviser in complete command. This is electrifying music.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams had always experimented with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she noted in an interview. She was given 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 removed a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor next to her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she stated.

Initially, Williams trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for embellishing a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the following week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Subsequently, Brubeck refer to 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, shows her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her long journeys to educate herself the genre – first, to the hipper sounds of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before moving backwards to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she soon grew disappointed with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "boys’ club," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of getting gigs – and of a corporate industry riding on the coattails of struggling artists.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she wrote in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, unflinching, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans individual. A commentator observed: "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 faced as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Her professional path moved toward self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the active Bay Area scene, she lived in 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 understood from the beginning the great promise of the internet