🔗 Share this article

Perusing the jazz section at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, producer Kye Potter came across a worn cassette by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It looked like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had come off the tape," he recalls. "It was personally duplicated, with xeroxed liners, a touch of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

Being 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 primarily recognized for creating lively jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the West Coast scene knew her as a sonic explorer – for her concerts, she requested pianos without the cover to allow her to reach inside and pluck the strings – it was a dimension that rarely made it on her albums.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to inquire if additional recordings were available. She sent back four recordings of altered piano from the mid 1980s – two live, two made in the studio. And though she had ceased playing publicly years earlier, she also shared some newer material. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – full releases," Potter recounts.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams during the Covid pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was released in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, during the project. She was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter says. Williams had been open regarding her struggles after spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "However, I believe her character, fortitude, assurance and the peace she found through having a spiritual practice all came out in conversation."

In later synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – boldly labeled "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a pianist attempting to break free of convention. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano resonances, reveals that that drive extended back decades. In place of a consistent piano sound, the instrument creates a multitude of sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, distant church bells, beasts in pens, and small devices sparking to life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with monumental roars giving way to biting, staccato riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Musician Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. 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 force of her music, but knew little of her dreamlike prepared piano until this release. Shortly after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Today, that appears completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Historical Influences

These modified tones have historical forerunners: reflect on John Cage’s modified instruments, or the innovative methods of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how successfully she fuses these innovative timbres with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The language rarely departs from that which she developed in a body of work extending to more than 80 albums, so that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are driven by the fizzy energy of an artist in full control. This is electrifying music.

A Constant Innovator

Throughout her life, Williams experimented with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she noted in an interview. She received her first upright piano in 1954. In her writings, she recounted the tale of her first "dismantling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she wrote: Williams took off 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 wrote.

Initially, Williams trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for embellishing a section. Yet he recognized her potential: a week later, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Subsequently, Brubeck call 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 immersion in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her long journeys to educate herself 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 soon grew disillusioned with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the senior musician'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 "old boys' network," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of landing performances – and of a corporate industry 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 sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, unflinching, expressly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a transgender woman. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her chosen artistic field for a period, imagine what kind of cruel nonsense she must have suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

Forging an Autonomous Career

Her professional path arced towards self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she lived in smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling in Portland in 1991, and later relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams understood from the beginning the immense possibilities of the internet