🔗 Share this article

While browsing the jazz section at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, collector Kye Potter found a battered tape by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It appeared like the classic independent effort. "The labels had come off the tape," he says. "It was personally duplicated, with printed inserts, a dab of fluorescent marker to accentuate the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector particularly interested in the avant-garde movement following John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt out of character for Williams, who was most famous for creating vibrant jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the California jazz community knew her as a sonic explorer – during her performances, she required pianos without the cover to facilitate to access the interior and pluck the strings – it was a aspect that infrequently appeared on her releases.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to see if further recordings were available. She responded with four recordings of altered piano from the mid-80s – two live, two made in the studio. Although she had stepped away from public performance some time before, she also shared some contemporary pieces. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – complete albums," Potter recounts.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams in the pandemic era to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was published in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, during the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter reveals. Williams had been open regarding her difficulties following spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "But I think her character, fortitude, assurance and the peace she found through meditative practices all came out in conversation."

In her subsequent synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – explicitly categorized "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a musician trying to transcend tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano resonances, reveals that that impulse extended back decades. In place of a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates a multitude of sonic evocations: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, remote carillons, animals rattling around cages, and tiny engines sparking to life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with massive roars collapsing into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Musician Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the power of her music, but knew little of her otherworldly prepared piano before this release. Soon after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "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 understood by me then."

Technical Precursors

Her altered piano techniques have artistic antecedents: consider John Cage’s modified instruments, or the radical techniques of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how successfully she merges these innovative timbres with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The stylistic approach rarely departs from that which she honed in a discography spanning more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new trippily tinted sounds are driven by the effervescent force of an improviser in total mastery. That's electrifying music.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Throughout her life, Williams tinkered with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she reportedly said. She obtained her first home piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she shared the anecdote of her first "dismantling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she commented: Williams detached a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor beside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she explained.

Early on, Williams learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for embellishing a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the next week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

In time, Brubeck call Williams "a top-tier 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 immersion in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Yet, despite her long journeys to study the genre – first, to the hipper sounds of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before working her way 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 was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged 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 low wages, the jazz "old boys' network," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of securing work – and of a corporate industry benefiting from the efforts of artists in need.

"I am continually disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she stated in the sleeve text 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 infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans woman. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her desired musical domain 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."

Forging an Autonomous Career

Williams’ career moved toward self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the active Bay Area scene, she relocated to smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling in Portland in 1991, and later moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the great promise of the internet