🔗 Share this article

Perusing the jazz section at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, producer Kye Potter found a battered tape by American pianist Jessica Williams. It appeared like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had detached from the tape," he says. "It was home-dubbed, with xeroxed liners, a little bit of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector deeply fascinated by the American musical avant garde following John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed atypical for Williams, who was primarily recognized for creating vibrant jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the West Coast scene knew her as a creative innovator – during her performances, she requested pianos lacking the lid to allow her to reach inside and play the strings directly – it was a aspect that rarely made it on her releases.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to inquire if additional recordings had been made. She sent back four recordings of prepared piano from the 1980s – two concert recordings, two recorded in a studio. And though she had long since retired years earlier, she also enclosed some contemporary pieces. "She sent me around 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – full releases," Potter recounts.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams during the Covid pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was released in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. She was 73. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter reveals. Williams had been vocal concerning her hardships 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 meditative practices 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 convention. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano reverberations, reveals that that desire stretched back decades. Instead of a uniform piano sound, the piano creates a multitude of sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, far-off chimes, beasts in pens, and tiny engines coughing to start. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with massive roars collapsing into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Composer 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 was largely unaware of her otherworldly prepared piano until this release. Not long after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Today, that appears completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Technical Precursors

These modified tones have historical forerunners: consider John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the groundbreaking approaches of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how successfully she fuses these novel textures with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. Her musical speech rarely departs from that which she cultivated in a catalog stretching to more than 80 albums, so that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are powered by the effervescent force of an artist in total mastery. It’s exhilarating material.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Throughout her life, Williams tinkered with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she once explained. She received her first vertical piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she recounted the tale of her first "disassembling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she wrote: Williams detached a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor next to her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she explained.

Williams originally trained in 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 embellishing a section. However, he detected her potential: the next week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Brubeck would later refer to Williams "one of the greatest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was equally admiring. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, shows her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Yet, despite her long journeys to educate herself the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before working her way back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she soon grew disappointed with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a strident, public critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "boys’ club," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of securing work – and of a commercial business benefiting from the efforts of artists in need.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she stated in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, direct, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a transgender woman. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her preferred musical arena for a period, imagine what kind of inhumane bullshit she must have endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

Williams’ career moved toward self-sufficiency. After time in the active Bay Area scene, she relocated to 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 understood from the beginning the huge potential of the internet