🔗 Share this article

While browsing the jazz aisle at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, collector Kye Potter came across a battered tape by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It appeared like the classic independent effort. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he recalls. "It was personally duplicated, with photocopied notes, a touch of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector particularly interested in the avant-garde movement post John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed atypical for Williams, who was most famous for creating sparkling jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the California jazz community knew her as a creative innovator – for her concerts, she asked for pianos without the cover to facilitate to reach inside and strum the strings – it was a aspect that rarely made it 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 existed. She sent back four recordings of prepared piano from the mid 1980s – two performance tapes, two made in the studio. Although she had ceased playing publicly years earlier, she also shared some recent work. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – complete albums," Potter recounts.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams during the Covid pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was issued in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter reveals. 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 personality, strength, self-confidence and the peace she found through having a spiritual practice all came out in conversation."

Within her more recent 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 transcend expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano reverberations, reveals that that desire reached back decades. In place of a uniform piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, distant church bells, animals rattling around cages, and little machines sparking to life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with massive roars dissolving into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the intensity of her music, but had scant knowledge of her surreal-sounding prepared piano prior to this release. Shortly after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Artistic Forebears

Her altered piano techniques have historical forerunners: consider John Cage’s modified instruments, or the groundbreaking approaches of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how masterfully she fuses these new sounds with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The language rarely departs from that which she honed in a body of work spanning more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new trippily tinted sounds are driven by the bubbling vitality of an performer in total mastery. This is thrilling stuff.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams had always experimented with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she once explained. She was given her first upright piano in 1954. In her writings, she recounted the tale of her first "disassembling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she commented: Williams took off a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor beside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she wrote.

Initially, Williams learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for improvising a section. However, he detected her potential: the next week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

Brubeck would later call Williams "a top-tier pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was similarly impressed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, displays her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. However, despite her extensive studies to learn about the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before working her way back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she soon grew disenchanted with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a strident, public critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "boys’ club," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of securing work – and of a profit-driven sector riding on the coattails of financially strained musicians.

"I am continually disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of core values," she wrote in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was eclectic, honest, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans woman. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her preferred musical arena 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

Williams’ career evolved into self-sufficiency. After time in the bustling 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 recognized early the immense possibilities of the internet