🔗 Share this article

Perusing the jazz aisle at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, artist Kye Potter discovered a well-used recording by musician Jessica Williams. It looked like the classic independent effort. "The labels had detached from the tape," he recalls. "It was copied at home, with printed inserts, a little bit of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector particularly interested in the American musical avant garde post John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed unusual from Williams, who was most famous for making vibrant jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the West Coast scene knew her as a musical experimenter – for her concerts, she requested pianos without the cover to facilitate to access the interior and play the strings directly – it was a dimension that infrequently appeared on her releases.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to ask if further recordings had been made. She responded with four recordings of prepared piano from the 1980s – two live, two studio creations. Although she had ceased playing publicly years earlier, she also shared some recent work. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synth tapes – full releases," Potter explains.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams throughout the pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was released in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, midway through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter states. Williams had been public about her difficulties following spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "Yet I feel her personality, strength, self-confidence and the peace she found through her spiritual pursuits all came out in conversation."

In later synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – defiantly tagged "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a pianist seeking to transcend tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano reverberations, demonstrates that that desire stretched back decades. Instead of a uniform piano sound, the instrument creates numerous distinct sonic impressions: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, remote carillons, creatures in enclosures, and tiny engines sparking to life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with monumental roars collapsing into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Musician Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the force of her music, but knew little of her otherworldly prepared piano until this release. Shortly after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Today, that appears completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Artistic Forebears

Williams’ prepared sounds have technical precursors: consider John Cage’s modified instruments, or the innovative methods of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how successfully she merges these new sounds with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The stylistic approach scarcely deviates from that which she developed in a discography spanning more than 80 albums, meaning the new trippily tinted sounds are fueled by the bubbling vitality of an artist in complete command. This is electrifying music.

A Constant Innovator

Throughout her life, Williams tinkered with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she once explained. She received her first home piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she shared the anecdote of her first "disassembling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she commented: Williams removed a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor beside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she wrote.

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

Jazz World Disillusionment

In time, 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, exhibits her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her dedicated efforts to learn about the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before tracing a path back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she soon grew disillusioned with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "boys’ club," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of getting gigs – and of a corporate industry profiting from the work of struggling artists.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of core values," she penned in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was eclectic, unflinching, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a transgender woman. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her desired musical domain for a period, imagine what kind of terrible treatment she must have faced as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

Forging an Autonomous Career

Her professional path moved toward self-sufficiency. After time in the active Bay Area scene, she relocated to smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, moving to Portland in 1991, and later going to a more remote location, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams understood from the beginning the immense possibilities of the internet