🔗 Share this article

Perusing the jazz aisle at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, producer Kye Potter discovered a battered tape by American pianist Jessica Williams. It seemed like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had detached from the tape," he says. "It was home-dubbed, with printed inserts, a touch of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector keenly focused on the U.S. experimental scene post John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt atypical for Williams, who was best known for making sparkling jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the California jazz community knew her as a creative innovator – for her concerts, she required pianos with the top removed to allow her to reach inside and pluck the strings – it was a facet that infrequently appeared on her releases.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to ask if additional recordings had been made. She responded with four recordings of altered piano from the 1980s – two concert recordings, two studio creations. Even though she had ceased playing publicly some time before, she also shared some newer material. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synth tapes – entire projects," Potter recounts.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams during the Covid pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was issued in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, during the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter states. Williams had been public about her hardships after spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "But I think her character, fortitude, assurance and the peace she found through her spiritual pursuits all were evident in conversation."

Within her more recent synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – boldly labeled "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 reverberations, shows that that drive reached back decades. Instead of a uniform piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic impressions: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, far-off chimes, beasts in pens, and little machines coughing to start. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with massive roars collapsing into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the intensity of her music, but had scant knowledge of her dreamlike prepared piano before this release. Not long after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Now that seems completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Technical Precursors

These modified tones have historical forerunners: reflect on John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the radical techniques of American eccentric Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how masterfully she fuses these innovative timbres with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. Her musical speech hardly ever strays from that which she developed in a body of work extending to more than 80 albums, meaning the new psychedelically coloured sounds are powered by the fizzy energy of an performer in complete command. This is thrilling stuff.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams consistently experimented with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she once explained. She obtained her first vertical piano in 1954. In her writings, she shared the anecdote of her first "disassembling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she noted: Williams detached a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor next to her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she stated.

Early on, Williams trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures 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. However, he detected her potential: the next week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

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, shows her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her long journeys to educate herself the genre – first, to the hipper sounds of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before tracing a path back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she rapidly felt disappointed with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the veteran'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 "old boys' network," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of getting gigs – and of a corporate industry profiting from the work of financially strained musicians.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she wrote in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was eclectic, direct, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a transgender woman. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her desired musical domain for a period, imagine what kind of inhumane bullshit 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 bustling Bay Area scene, she lived in 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 saw early on the immense possibilities of the internet