🔗 Share this article

Perusing the jazz aisle at a local record store a few years ago, collector Kye Potter discovered a battered tape by American pianist Jessica Williams. It looked like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he notes. "It was copied at home, with xeroxed liners, a dab of fluorescent marker to emphasize the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector deeply fascinated by the U.S. experimental scene post John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared unusual from Williams, who was primarily recognized for making sparkling jazz in the straight-ahead tradition 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 with the top removed to make it easier to get inside and play the strings directly – it was a aspect that rarely made it on her albums.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to inquire if further recordings had been made. She provided four recordings of modified piano from the mid 1980s – two concert recordings, two recorded in a studio. Although she had ceased playing publicly years earlier, she also included some newer material. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synth tapes – complete albums," Potter explains.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams during the Covid pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was released in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter reveals. Williams had been open regarding her difficulties after spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a diagnosis of cancer 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 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 musician attempting to break free of tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano reverberations, shows that that desire stretched back decades. Instead of a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic evocations: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, distant church bells, creatures in enclosures, and little machines sparking to life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with massive roars giving way to biting, staccato riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the force of her music, but knew little of her dreamlike prepared piano prior to this release. Soon after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Historical Influences

Williams’ prepared sounds have artistic antecedents: think of John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the radical techniques of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how effectively she blends these novel textures with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The stylistic approach scarcely deviates from that which she cultivated in a catalog spanning more than 80 albums, meaning the new trippily tinted sounds are powered by the bubbling vitality of an improviser in complete command. That's thrilling stuff.

A Constant Innovator

Williams consistently experimented with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she once explained. She obtained her first upright piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she recounted the tale of her first "dismantling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she commented: Williams took off a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor alongside her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she wrote.

Early on, Williams studied 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 scolded her for embellishing a section. But he saw her potential: the following week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Brubeck would later 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 immersion in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Yet, despite her extensive studies to learn about the genre – first, to the more modern styles 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 was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "boys’ club," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of getting gigs – and of a corporate industry benefiting from the efforts of struggling artists.

"I am continually 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 penned in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, unflinching, openly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans woman. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her preferred musical arena for a period, imagine what kind of terrible treatment she must have suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

The artist's trajectory evolved into self-sufficiency. Following a period in the bustling Bay Area scene, she relocated to smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling in Portland in 1991, and later relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the immense possibilities of the internet