Flipping through the jazz section at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, producer Kye Potter found a worn cassette by musician Jessica Williams. It appeared like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he recalls. "It was copied at home, with xeroxed liners, a dab of fluorescent marker to accentuate the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."
As a collector keenly focused on the U.S. experimental scene post John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt unusual from Williams, who was primarily recognized for making sparkling jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.
Although the West Coast scene knew her as a musical experimenter – for her concerts, she required pianos lacking the lid to facilitate to get inside and play the strings directly – it was a dimension that seldom found its way on her releases.
"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to see if any more recordings existed. She provided four recordings of altered piano from the mid 1980s – two concert recordings, two studio creations. Although she had ceased playing publicly previously, she also included some newer material. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synth tapes – entire projects," says Potter.
Potter partnered with Williams throughout the pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was released in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, midway through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," 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. "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) – explicitly categorized "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a pianist seeking to break free of tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano echoes, reveals that that drive reached back decades. Rather than a homogenous piano sound, the piano creates numerous distinct sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, far-off chimes, creatures in enclosures, and tiny engines coughing to start. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with massive roars dissolving into biting, staccato riffs.
Guitarist Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the force of her music, but was largely unaware of her surreal-sounding prepared piano until this release. Shortly after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Today, that appears completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was known to me then."
Williams’ prepared sounds have technical precursors: consider John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the groundbreaking approaches of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how successfully she merges these novel textures with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. Her musical speech scarcely deviates from that which she cultivated in a body of work spanning more than 80 albums, so that the new trippily tinted sounds are powered by the bubbling vitality of an performer in total mastery. It’s thrilling stuff.
Williams consistently experimented with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she reportedly said. She obtained her first vertical piano in 1954. In her writings, she shared the anecdote of her first "taking apart" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she commented: Williams detached a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor beside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she stated.
Williams originally studied 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 reprimanded 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.
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, shows her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. However, despite her long journeys to study 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 soon grew disillusioned with the jazz world.
Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the veteran'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 "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of securing work – and of a commercial business 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 essential beliefs," she penned in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was eclectic, unflinching, expressly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a transgender woman. A commentator observed: "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."
Her professional path moved toward self-sufficiency. After time in the bustling 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 understood from the beginning the great promise of the internet
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