🔗 Share this article

Perusing the jazz section at a local record store a few years ago, producer Kye Potter found a worn cassette by American pianist Jessica Williams. It looked like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he says. "It was copied at home, with printed inserts, a dab of fluorescent marker to accentuate the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector deeply fascinated by the avant-garde movement after John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt out of character for Williams, who was primarily recognized for producing lively jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a creative innovator – for her concerts, she required pianos without the cover to make it easier to access the interior and play the strings directly – it was a dimension that rarely made it on her releases.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to see if further recordings were available. She provided four recordings of modified piano from the 1980s – two live, two recorded in a studio. Even though she had ceased playing publicly previously, she also shared some contemporary pieces. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synth tapes – entire projects," Potter recounts.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams in the pandemic era to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was released in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, part way through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter reveals. Williams had been vocal concerning her difficulties following spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "However, I believe her character, fortitude, assurance and the peace she found through her spiritual pursuits all came out in conversation."

In later electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – defiantly tagged "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a pianist trying to transcend tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano echoes, demonstrates that that impulse extended back decades. Instead of a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates numerous distinct sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, far-off chimes, animals rattling around cages, and small devices spluttering into life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with massive roars giving way to snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Listener Praise

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the intensity of her music, but knew little of her dreamlike prepared piano until this release. Shortly after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Artistic Forebears

These modified tones have technical precursors: think of John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the radical techniques of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how successfully she merges these innovative timbres with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. Her musical speech scarcely deviates from that which she developed in a body of work extending to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new trippily tinted sounds are powered by the fizzy energy of an artist in total mastery. It’s thrilling stuff.

A Constant Innovator

Throughout her life, Williams tinkered with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she reportedly said. She received her first home piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she told the story of her first "taking apart" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she noted: Williams removed a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor alongside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she stated.

Initially, Williams studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for altering a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the following week, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

In time, Brubeck describe Williams "among the finest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was just as awed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, exhibits her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. However, despite her long journeys to educate herself the genre – first, to the hipper sounds of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before moving backwards to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she rapidly felt disenchanted with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged 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 "boys’ club," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of securing work – and of a profit-driven sector riding on the coattails of struggling artists.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she wrote in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, unflinching, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans woman. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her chosen artistic field for a period, imagine what kind of cruel nonsense she must have endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

The artist's trajectory moved toward self-sufficiency. After time in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she lived in smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, making a home in Portland in 1991, and later moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the immense possibilities of the internet