🔗 Share this article

Flipping through the jazz section at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, producer Kye Potter found a battered tape by musician Jessica Williams. It appeared like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had detached from the tape," he says. "It was personally duplicated, with photocopied notes, a dab of fluorescent marker to emphasize the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector deeply fascinated by the American musical avant garde after John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt out of character for Williams, who was best known for creating vibrant jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a sonic explorer – for her concerts, she requested pianos without the cover to make it easier to access the interior and strum the strings – it was a facet that infrequently appeared on her albums.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to ask if any more recordings existed. She responded with four recordings of altered piano from the mid 1980s – two live, two made in the studio. Even though she had stepped away from public performance some time before, she also enclosed some contemporary pieces. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synth tapes – full releases," Potter recounts.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams in the pandemic era to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was issued in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter states. Williams had been public about her struggles after spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "Yet I feel her character, fortitude, assurance and the peace she found through having a spiritual practice all shone through in conversation."

Within her more recent 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 attempting to break free of expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano resonances, demonstrates that that drive extended back decades. Rather than a consistent piano sound, the instrument creates a multitude of sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, far-off chimes, beasts in pens, and tiny engines coughing to start. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with colossal bellows dissolving into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Listener Praise

Musician Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the power of her music, but had scant knowledge of her dreamlike prepared piano before this release. Not long after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Now that seems completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Technical Precursors

Her altered piano techniques have artistic antecedents: think of John Cage’s modified instruments, or the groundbreaking approaches of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how masterfully she merges these innovative timbres with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The language scarcely deviates from that which she developed in a catalog stretching to more than 80 albums, so that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are fueled by the fizzy energy of an artist in total mastery. That's thrilling stuff.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams had always explored the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she reportedly said. She obtained her first vertical piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she recounted the tale of her first "dismantling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she noted: Williams removed a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor beside 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 learned his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Subsequently, Brubeck describe Williams "a top-tier pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was equally admiring. 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 dedicated efforts to educate herself 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 soon grew disenchanted with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of getting gigs – and of a profit-driven sector profiting from the work of financially strained musicians.

"I am continually disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she stated in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was eclectic, unflinching, openly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a transgender woman. A writer pointed out: "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 endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

Williams’ career arced towards self-sufficiency. Following a period in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling 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 great promise of the internet