🔗 Share this article

Perusing the jazz aisle at a local record store a few years ago, artist Kye Potter found a battered tape by musician Jessica Williams. It seemed like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he recalls. "It was home-dubbed, with printed inserts, a little bit of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector particularly interested in the avant-garde movement following John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt out of character for Williams, who was best known for producing sparkling jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the West Coast scene knew her as a creative innovator – during her performances, she required pianos with the top removed to make it easier to get inside and play the strings directly – it was a dimension that infrequently appeared on her records.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to inquire if additional recordings were available. She sent back four recordings of prepared piano from the mid 1980s – two performance tapes, two recorded in a studio. And though she had long since retired years earlier, she also included some recent work. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synth tapes – full releases," Potter recounts.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams in the pandemic era to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was published 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 vocal concerning her hardships following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "Yet I feel her character, fortitude, assurance and the peace she found through meditative practices 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 musician trying to break free of convention. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano reverberations, demonstrates that that desire reached back decades. In place of a uniform piano sound, the instrument creates numerous distinct sonic impressions: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, far-off chimes, animals rattling around cages, and small devices spluttering into life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with colossal bellows giving way to snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Listener Praise

Musician Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the power of her music, but was largely unaware of her surreal-sounding prepared piano until this release. Shortly after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Today, that appears completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Historical Influences

Her altered piano techniques have artistic antecedents: reflect on John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the groundbreaking approaches of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how effectively she merges these innovative timbres with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The stylistic approach scarcely deviates from that which she honed in a discography extending to more than 80 albums, meaning the new psychedelically coloured sounds are driven by the bubbling vitality of an performer in total mastery. This is electrifying music.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams consistently tinkered with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she once explained. She received her first vertical piano in 1954. On her blog, she shared the anecdote of her first "disassembling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she wrote: Williams removed a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor beside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she wrote.

Early on, Williams learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for altering a section. However, he detected her potential: a week later, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Brubeck would later 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 absorption in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. However, despite her dedicated efforts to study the genre – first, to the hipper sounds of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before moving backwards to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she rapidly felt disillusioned with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a strident, public critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "boys’ club," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of landing performances – and of a profit-driven sector profiting from the work of struggling artists.

"I am continually disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of core values," she wrote in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, direct, expressly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans individual. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that drove 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."

A Journey of Independence

The artist's trajectory moved toward self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint 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 understood from the beginning the huge potential of the internet