While browsing the jazz records at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, artist Kye Potter discovered a well-used recording by musician Jessica Williams. It seemed like the classic independent effort. "The labels had come off the tape," he recalls. "It was copied at home, with printed inserts, a dab of fluorescent marker to highlight the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."
As a collector deeply fascinated by the American musical avant garde post John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed out of character for Williams, who was most famous for making sparkling jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.
While the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a musical experimenter – for her concerts, she required pianos without the cover to allow her to reach inside and play the strings directly – it was a dimension that seldom found its way on her releases.
"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to see if any more recordings existed. She sent back four recordings of modified piano from the 1980s – two concert recordings, two studio creations. Even though she had stepped away from public performance years earlier, she also shared some newer material. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synth tapes – entire projects," says Potter.
Potter worked with Williams during the Covid pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was issued in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter states. Williams had been public about her difficulties after spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "Yet I feel her personality, strength, self-confidence and the serenity she found through her spiritual pursuits all came out 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 musician trying to transcend tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano echoes, demonstrates that that impulse extended back decades. In place of a consistent piano sound, the piano creates a multitude of sonic evocations: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, beasts in pens, and small devices sparking to life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with monumental roars collapsing into biting, staccato riffs.
Musician Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the power of her music, but had scant knowledge of her surreal-sounding prepared piano prior to this release. Not long after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Now that seems completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."
Her altered piano techniques have historical forerunners: reflect on John Cage’s modified instruments, or the radical techniques of American eccentric Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how successfully she merges these novel textures with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The language rarely departs from that which she cultivated in a body of work extending to more than 80 albums, meaning the new psychedelically coloured sounds are driven by the fizzy energy of an artist in total mastery. It’s electrifying music.
Throughout her life, Williams tinkered with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she noted in an interview. She was given her first vertical piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she recounted the tale of her first "disassembling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she noted: Williams took off a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor next to her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she explained.
Initially, Williams trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the standard canon 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.
Brubeck would later refer to 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, shows her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her dedicated efforts to learn about the genre – first, to the hipper sounds of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before working her way back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she quickly became disappointed with the jazz world.
Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met 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 low wages, the jazz "old boys' network," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of landing performances – and of a corporate industry profiting from the work of financially strained musicians.
"I remain constantly disappointed at the nature 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. Likewise, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, direct, expressly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a transgender woman. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her chosen artistic field 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."
Williams’ career evolved into self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she lived in smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, moving to Portland in 1991, and later moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the immense possibilities of the internet
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