🔗 Share this article

While browsing the jazz records at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, artist Kye Potter found a worn cassette by musician Jessica Williams. It looked like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had come off the tape," he recalls. "It was home-dubbed, with printed inserts, a dab of fluorescent marker to emphasize the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector keenly focused on the U.S. experimental scene following John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared unusual from Williams, who was best known for making sparkling jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a creative innovator – at her live shows, she required pianos with the top removed to allow her to access the interior and strum the strings – it was a dimension that seldom found its way on her records.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to ask if further recordings existed. She sent back four recordings of prepared piano from the mid 1980s – two live, two recorded in a studio. Although she had stepped away from public performance years earlier, she also enclosed some recent work. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synth tapes – complete albums," Potter recounts.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams in the pandemic era to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was published in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, midway through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter says. Williams had been open regarding her difficulties following spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "However, I believe her personality, strength, self-confidence and the calmness she found through meditative practices all shone through 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 artist trying to transcend convention. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano reverberations, demonstrates that that impulse stretched back decades. Instead of a uniform piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic evocations: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, distant church bells, animals rattling around cages, and small devices coughing to start. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with monumental roars collapsing into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Listener Praise

Guitarist Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Vocalist 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 attracted to the force of her music, but was largely unaware of her dreamlike prepared piano prior to this release. Soon after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Today, that appears completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Technical Precursors

These modified tones have artistic antecedents: reflect on John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the groundbreaking approaches of American eccentric Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how masterfully she blends these innovative timbres with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The stylistic approach scarcely deviates from that which she cultivated in a body of work spanning more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are driven by the effervescent force of an performer in complete command. That's exhilarating material.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams had always explored the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she once explained. She received her first upright piano in 1954. On her blog, she recounted the tale of her first "taking apart" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she wrote: Williams removed a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor next to her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she stated.

Initially, Williams studied 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 chastised her for embellishing a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the following week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Brubeck would later refer to Williams "a top-tier pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was just as awed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, shows her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. However, despite her long journeys to study the genre – first, to the more modern styles of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before moving backwards to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she rapidly felt disappointed with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a strident, public critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "old boys' network," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of landing performances – and of a commercial business profiting from the work of artists in need.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she wrote in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, honest, openly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans individual. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that pushed 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."

Forging an Autonomous Career

Her professional path arced towards self-sufficiency. Following a period in the active Bay Area scene, she lived in 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 huge potential of the internet