While browsing the jazz section at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, artist Kye Potter came across a well-used recording by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It seemed like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he recalls. "It was home-dubbed, with xeroxed liners, a dab of fluorescent marker to emphasize the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."
As a collector particularly interested in the U.S. experimental scene following John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt out of character for Williams, who was primarily recognized for producing lively jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.
If the California jazz community knew her as a sonic explorer – at her live shows, she asked for pianos without the cover to allow her to access the interior and play the strings directly – it was a dimension that seldom found its way on her releases.
"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to ask if additional recordings existed. She sent back four recordings of altered piano from the 1980s – two concert recordings, two recorded in a studio. Even though she had stepped away from public performance previously, she also enclosed some newer material. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synth tapes – complete albums," says Potter.
Potter collaborated with Williams in the pandemic era to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was issued in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter says. Williams had been vocal concerning her hardships following spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "Yet I feel her personality, strength, self-confidence and the serenity she found through her spiritual pursuits all shone through in conversation."
In her subsequent synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – defiantly tagged "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a musician trying to break free of convention. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano echoes, shows that that desire reached back decades. Rather than a consistent piano sound, the piano creates a multitude of sonic associations: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, remote carillons, animals rattling around cages, and little machines spluttering into life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with massive roars dissolving into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.
Guitarist Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the power of her music, but was largely unaware of her dreamlike prepared piano prior to this release. Shortly 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 relationship with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."
Her altered piano techniques have technical precursors: consider John Cage’s modified instruments, or the innovative methods of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how effectively she fuses these innovative timbres with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The stylistic approach scarcely deviates from that which she honed in a catalog extending to more than 80 albums, so that the new trippily tinted sounds are fueled by the effervescent force of an improviser in total mastery. That's electrifying music.
Throughout her life, Williams experimented with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she noted in an interview. She obtained her first vertical piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she told the story of her first "dismantling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she noted: Williams removed a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor alongside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she stated.
Initially, Williams studied 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 improvising a section. However, he detected her potential: the following week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.
Brubeck would later refer to 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 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 working her way back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she soon grew disappointed with the jazz world.
Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of landing performances – and of a profit-driven sector profiting from the work of struggling artists.
"I am repeatedly disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she stated in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, direct, expressly 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 chosen artistic field 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."
Williams’ career moved toward self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the bustling Bay Area scene, she lived in 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 saw early on the immense possibilities of the internet
A seasoned software engineer with a passion for open-source projects and tech education.
