🔗 Share this article

While browsing the jazz aisle at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, artist Kye Potter found a well-used recording by American pianist Jessica Williams. It seemed like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he recalls. "It was copied at home, with xeroxed liners, a touch of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector keenly focused on the U.S. experimental scene after John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed out of character for Williams, who was most famous for creating sparkling jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the California jazz community knew her as a creative innovator – during her performances, she required pianos with the top removed to make it easier to access the interior and pluck the strings – it was a dimension that rarely made it on her albums.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to ask if further 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 ceased playing publicly previously, she also included some newer material. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synth tapes – complete albums," Potter explains.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams during the Covid pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was released in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter states. Williams had been open regarding her hardships following spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "However, I believe her personality, strength, self-confidence and the serenity she found through meditative practices all shone through 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 artist attempting to transcend tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano resonances, demonstrates that that desire stretched back decades. In place of a homogenous piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, far-off chimes, beasts in pens, and little machines sparking to life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with massive roars dissolving into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Listener Praise

Guitarist Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the power of her music, but knew little of her surreal-sounding prepared piano prior to this release. Not long after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Now that seems completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Technical Precursors

Her altered piano techniques have technical precursors: consider John Cage’s modified instruments, or the innovative methods of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how successfully she blends these novel textures with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. Her musical speech hardly ever strays from that which she honed in a catalog spanning more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are powered by the bubbling vitality of an performer in full control. This is electrifying music.

A Constant Innovator

Throughout her life, Williams experimented with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she reportedly said. She was given her first vertical piano in 1954. On her blog, she recounted the tale of her first "taking apart" – "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. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she wrote.

Early on, Williams learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for embellishing a section. However, he detected her potential: a week later, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

Subsequently, Brubeck 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, shows her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. However, despite her long journeys to educate herself the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before moving backwards to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she quickly became disappointed with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a strident, public critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "boys’ club," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of landing performances – and of a commercial business profiting from the work of artists in need.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of core values," she penned in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was eclectic, honest, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans individual. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her desired musical domain 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."

Forging an Autonomous Career

Williams’ career moved toward self-sufficiency. Following a period in the bustling Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, moving to Portland in 1991, and later moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the immense possibilities of the internet