🔗 Share this article

Flipping through the jazz section at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, collector Kye Potter came across a battered tape by musician Jessica Williams. It looked like the classic independent effort. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he says. "It was personally duplicated, with xeroxed liners, a little bit of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector deeply fascinated by the American musical avant garde after John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed unusual from Williams, who was most famous for producing vibrant jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the West Coast scene knew her as a sonic explorer – during her performances, she required pianos with the top removed to make it easier to get inside and pluck the strings – it was a aspect that seldom found its way on her releases.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to see if further recordings had been made. She sent back four recordings of modified piano from the mid-80s – two live, two studio creations. Even though she had long since retired some time before, she also shared some newer material. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synth tapes – complete albums," Potter explains.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams in the pandemic era to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was published in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter says. Williams had been public about her difficulties after spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "Yet I feel her personality, strength, self-confidence and the peace she found through her spiritual pursuits all were evident in conversation."

In her subsequent 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 trying to break free of convention. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano echoes, reveals that that desire stretched back decades. Rather than a uniform piano sound, the instrument creates numerous distinct sonic associations: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, creatures in enclosures, and little machines coughing to start. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with monumental roars collapsing into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Listener Praise

Guitarist Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated 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 until this release. Shortly after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Now that seems completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Historical Influences

Williams’ prepared sounds have technical precursors: consider John Cage’s modified instruments, or the innovative methods of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how effectively she merges these new sounds with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The language rarely departs from that which she developed in a catalog spanning more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are powered by the effervescent force of an improviser in full control. That's thrilling stuff.

A Constant Innovator

Williams had always experimented with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she once explained. She was given her first upright piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she recounted the tale of her first "dismantling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she commented: Williams removed a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor beside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she explained.

Williams originally trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for improvising a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the following week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Brubeck would later describe Williams "among the finest 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 trademark playful pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her extensive studies to study 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 rapidly felt disillusioned with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of securing work – and of a profit-driven sector riding on the coattails of struggling artists.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of core values," she penned in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, honest, expressly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans individual. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her chosen artistic field for a period, imagine what kind of terrible treatment she must have endured 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 bustling Bay Area scene, she lived in smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling 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