🔗 Share this article

Perusing the jazz aisle at a local record store a few years ago, producer Kye Potter came across a well-used recording by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It looked 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 accentuate the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector particularly interested in the U.S. experimental scene following John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt atypical for Williams, who was best known for making sparkling jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a musical experimenter – for her concerts, she asked for pianos with the top removed to make it easier to reach inside and strum the strings – it was a aspect that rarely made it on her records.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to inquire if additional recordings had been made. She responded with four recordings of modified piano from the 1980s – two concert recordings, two studio creations. And though she had ceased playing publicly years earlier, she also shared some newer material. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synth tapes – entire projects," Potter explains.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams throughout the pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was released in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, during the project. She 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. "But I think her personality, strength, self-confidence and the serenity she found through her spiritual pursuits 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 attempting to break free of expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano reverberations, reveals that that impulse extended back decades. Rather than a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates numerous distinct sonic impressions: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, remote carillons, creatures in enclosures, and little machines coughing to start. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with massive roars giving way to snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" 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 drawn to the intensity of her music, but was largely unaware 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. "Now that seems completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Historical Influences

Her altered piano techniques have historical forerunners: consider John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the innovative methods of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how effectively she blends these new sounds with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The language hardly ever strays from that which she cultivated in a body of work spanning more than 80 albums, meaning the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are fueled by the fizzy energy of an improviser in full control. It’s thrilling stuff.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams consistently tinkered with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she noted in an interview. She received her first vertical piano in 1954. On her blog, she told the story of her first "taking apart" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she wrote: Williams removed a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor next to her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she wrote.

Williams originally learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for improvising a section. Yet he recognized her potential: a week later, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

Subsequently, Brubeck refer to 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 knowledge of jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. However, despite her extensive studies to educate herself the genre – first, to the more modern styles of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before tracing a path back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she soon grew disappointed with the jazz world.

Upon relocating 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 strident, public critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "old boys' network," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of landing performances – and of a commercial business profiting from the work of artists in need.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of core values," she wrote in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was eclectic, honest, openly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans individual. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her preferred musical arena for a period, imagine what kind of cruel nonsense she must have suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

Forging an Autonomous Career

The artist's trajectory evolved into self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the bustling Bay Area scene, she moved through 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