🔗 Share this article

While browsing the jazz section at a local record store a few years ago, artist Kye Potter discovered a worn cassette by musician Jessica Williams. It appeared like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had come off the tape," he recalls. "It was personally duplicated, with xeroxed liners, a little bit of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector deeply fascinated by the American musical avant garde after John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt unusual from Williams, who was most famous for producing sparkling jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the California jazz community knew her as a musical experimenter – at her live shows, she required pianos lacking the lid to allow her to reach inside and play the strings directly – it was a aspect that rarely made it on her releases.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to see if further recordings were available. She provided four recordings of prepared piano from the mid-80s – two performance tapes, two recorded in a studio. Even though she had long since retired years earlier, she also enclosed some contemporary pieces. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synth tapes – full releases," says Potter.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams throughout the pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was issued in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, part way 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 ended her ability to tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "Yet I feel her character, fortitude, assurance and the serenity she found through meditative practices all came out 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 escape convention. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano echoes, shows that that drive reached back decades. Instead of a uniform piano sound, the piano creates numerous distinct sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, far-off chimes, animals rattling around cages, and little machines coughing to start. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with massive roars giving way to growling, sharply accented riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the power of her music, but had scant knowledge of her surreal-sounding prepared piano before this release. Soon after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Historical Influences

These modified tones have technical precursors: reflect on John Cage’s modified instruments, or the groundbreaking approaches of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how masterfully she merges these new sounds with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The stylistic approach rarely departs from that which she developed in a body of work spanning more than 80 albums, so that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are powered by the fizzy energy of an artist in complete command. It’s exhilarating material.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Throughout her life, Williams experimented with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she once explained. She received her first home piano in 1954. On her blog, she shared the anecdote of her first "disassembling" – "something I repeated 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 stated.

Early on, Williams trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for embellishing a section. But he saw her potential: the following week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Subsequently, Brubeck call 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, shows her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. However, despite her extensive studies to learn about the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches 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.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of landing performances – and of a profit-driven sector riding on the coattails of struggling artists.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she stated in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was eclectic, unflinching, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans individual. As one critic noted: "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 endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

The artist's trajectory moved toward self-sufficiency. Following a period in the bustling Bay Area scene, she relocated to smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, moving to Portland in 1991, and later relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams understood from the beginning the great promise of the internet