🔗 Share this article

Perusing the jazz aisle at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, artist Kye Potter discovered a well-used recording by American pianist Jessica Williams. It appeared like the classic independent effort. "The labels had detached from the tape," he says. "It was copied at home, with xeroxed liners, a dab of fluorescent marker to accentuate the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector particularly interested in the U.S. experimental scene following John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed unusual from Williams, who was best known for making vibrant jazz in the direct lineage 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 facilitate to get inside and play the strings directly – it was a facet that seldom found its way on her releases.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to inquire if additional recordings were available. She sent back four recordings of altered piano from the 1980s – two concert recordings, two made in the studio. Even though she had stepped away from public performance years earlier, she also shared some contemporary pieces. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synth tapes – full releases," Potter explains.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams throughout the pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was issued in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. She was 73. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter states. Williams had been vocal concerning her hardships following spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "Yet I feel her personality, strength, self-confidence and the peace she found through having a spiritual practice all shone through in conversation."

In later 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 pianist seeking to transcend tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano resonances, shows that that drive extended back decades. In place of a uniform piano sound, the piano creates a multitude of sonic evocations: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, remote carillons, animals rattling around cages, and little machines spluttering into life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with colossal bellows dissolving into biting, staccato riffs.

Listener Praise

Musician Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the intensity of her music, but had scant knowledge of her dreamlike prepared piano until this release. Shortly after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Today, that appears completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Artistic Forebears

Her altered piano techniques have technical precursors: think of John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the radical techniques of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how successfully she blends these new sounds with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. Her musical speech rarely departs from that which she developed in a discography spanning more than 80 albums, meaning the new psychedelically coloured sounds are powered by the bubbling vitality of an performer in full control. It’s exhilarating material.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams had always explored the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she once explained. She received her first upright piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she told the story of her first "disassembling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she wrote: Williams took off a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor next to her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she stated.

Williams originally learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for altering a section. However, he detected her potential: the next week, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

Brubeck would later refer to Williams "among the finest 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 knowledge of jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her extensive studies to educate herself the genre – first, to the more modern styles of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before tracing a path back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she quickly became disillusioned with the jazz world.

After moving 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 became a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "boys’ club," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of securing work – and of a corporate industry riding on the coattails of struggling artists.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she stated in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, unflinching, openly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a transgender woman. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her preferred musical arena for a period, imagine what kind of inhumane bullshit she must have faced as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

The artist's trajectory moved toward self-sufficiency. After time in the active Bay Area scene, she relocated to 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 saw early on the great promise of the internet