🔗 Share this article

While browsing the jazz records at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, producer Kye Potter came across a battered tape by musician Jessica Williams. It seemed like the classic independent effort. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he says. "It was personally duplicated, with printed inserts, a touch of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector particularly interested in the American musical avant garde after John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared unusual from Williams, who was primarily recognized for producing vibrant jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a musical experimenter – at her live shows, she asked for pianos without the cover to facilitate to access the interior and strum the strings – it was a aspect that seldom found its way on her albums.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to ask if further recordings existed. She provided four recordings of modified piano from the mid 1980s – two performance tapes, two made in the studio. And though she had stepped away from public performance previously, she also shared some contemporary pieces. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – full releases," Potter recounts.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams during the Covid pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was published in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, midway through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter states. Williams had been open regarding her struggles after spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "But I think her character, fortitude, assurance and the calmness she found through having a spiritual practice all were evident in conversation."

In later electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – boldly labeled "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a pianist seeking to transcend expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano echoes, shows that that drive stretched back decades. Rather than a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates numerous distinct sonic associations: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, distant church bells, beasts in pens, and little machines sparking to life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with monumental roars dissolving into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the intensity of her music, but knew little of her surreal-sounding prepared piano until this release. Soon after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Now that seems completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Artistic Forebears

These modified tones have historical forerunners: think of John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the innovative methods of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how effectively she merges these novel textures with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. Her musical speech hardly ever strays from that which she cultivated in a catalog spanning more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are fueled by the effervescent force of an performer in complete command. This is electrifying music.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams had always tinkered with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she reportedly said. She obtained her first home piano in 1954. On her blog, she shared the anecdote of her first "dismantling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she noted: Williams took off a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor next to her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she stated.

Initially, Williams learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for improvising a section. Yet he recognized her potential: a week later, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

Brubeck would later describe Williams "one of the greatest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was just as awed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, displays her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Yet, despite her extensive studies to study the genre – first, to the more modern styles of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before working her way back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she rapidly felt disenchanted with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a strident, public critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of securing work – and of a profit-driven sector benefiting from the efforts of artists in need.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she penned in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was eclectic, unflinching, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a transgender woman. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her desired musical domain 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."

Forging an Autonomous Career

The artist's trajectory arced towards self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, moving to Portland in 1991, and later going to a more remote location, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams understood from the beginning the huge potential of the internet