🔗 Share this article

Flipping through the jazz section at a local record store a few years ago, producer Kye Potter came across a well-used recording by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It seemed like the classic independent effort. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he notes. "It was home-dubbed, with printed inserts, a little bit of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector particularly interested in the avant-garde movement following John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed atypical for Williams, who was most famous for making sparkling jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the West Coast scene knew her as a creative innovator – for her concerts, she asked for pianos lacking the lid to allow her to access the interior 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. Consequently, he contacted Williams to ask if further recordings existed. She responded with four recordings of altered piano from the mid 1980s – two concert recordings, two made in the studio. And though she had stepped away from public performance some time before, she also enclosed some newer material. "She sent me around 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – entire projects," says Potter.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams during the Covid pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was issued in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, midway through the project. She was 73. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter reveals. Williams had been public about her hardships following spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "However, I believe her character, fortitude, assurance and the peace she found through meditative practices all shone through in conversation."

Within her more recent 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 musician seeking to break free of expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano resonances, demonstrates that that desire extended back decades. Instead of a consistent piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, far-off chimes, creatures in enclosures, and tiny engines coughing to start. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with monumental roars dissolving into biting, staccato riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Guitarist Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the force of her music, but was largely unaware of her dreamlike prepared piano prior to this release. Shortly after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Artistic Forebears

Her altered piano techniques have technical precursors: reflect on John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the radical techniques of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how successfully she blends these new sounds with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. Her musical speech hardly ever strays from that which she honed in a discography stretching to more than 80 albums, meaning the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are powered by the effervescent force of an performer in full control. It’s thrilling stuff.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams had always experimented with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she noted in an interview. She received her first upright piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she recounted the tale of her first "dismantling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she wrote: Williams detached a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor next to her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she wrote.

Williams originally trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for embellishing a section. But he saw her potential: the next week, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

Brubeck would later describe 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 signature clever pianistic wit. However, despite her dedicated efforts 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 quickly became disenchanted with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a strident, public critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of securing work – and of a profit-driven sector profiting from the work of financially strained musicians.

"I am continually disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she wrote in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, 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 preferred musical arena for a period, imagine what kind of cruel nonsense she must have suffered 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. Following a period 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 recognized early the huge potential of the internet