While browsing the jazz aisle at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, artist Kye Potter came across a worn cassette by musician Jessica Williams. It looked like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he notes. "It was copied at home, with photocopied notes, a touch of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."
As a collector keenly focused on the U.S. experimental scene post John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared atypical for Williams, who was best known for creating vibrant jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.
If the California jazz community knew her as a musical experimenter – for her concerts, she required pianos lacking the lid to make it easier to access the interior and pluck the strings – it was a facet that infrequently appeared on her releases.
"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to inquire if further recordings were available. She sent back four recordings of modified piano from the 1980s – two live, two recorded in a studio. And though she had ceased playing publicly previously, she also included some recent work. "She sent me around 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – complete albums," says Potter.
A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction
Potter worked with Williams throughout the pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was released in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter reveals. Williams had been open regarding her hardships following spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "But I think her character, fortitude, assurance and the calmness she found through having a spiritual practice all shone through in conversation."
In later synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – explicitly categorized "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a pianist attempting to break free of convention. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano resonances, demonstrates that that drive reached back decades. In place of a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates a multitude of sonic impressions: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, animals rattling around cages, and tiny engines sparking to life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with colossal bellows collapsing into growling, sharply accented riffs.
Artistic Recognition
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))), experienced Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the intensity of her music, but had scant knowledge of her otherworldly prepared piano before this release. Not long after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Today, that appears completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."
Historical Influences
Her altered piano techniques have technical precursors: reflect on John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the innovative methods of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how successfully she merges these novel textures with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The stylistic approach hardly ever strays from that which she developed in a body of work stretching to more than 80 albums, so that the new trippily tinted sounds are driven by the effervescent force of an performer in complete command. This is thrilling stuff.
An Eternal Tinkerer
Williams had always explored the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she noted in an interview. She was given her first upright piano in 1954. In her writings, she told the story of her first "disassembling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she noted: Williams removed a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor beside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she stated.
Initially, Williams learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for improvising a section. However, he detected her potential: a week later, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.
Industry Disappointment
In time, Brubeck call 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 absorption in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Yet, despite her long journeys to learn about the genre – first, to the more modern styles of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before moving backwards to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she quickly became disappointed with the jazz world.
Following her relocation 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 meagre pay, the jazz "old boys' network," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of getting gigs – and of a commercial business profiting from the work of financially strained musicians.
"I am continually disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of core values," she wrote in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, direct, openly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a transgender woman. As one critic noted: "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."
A Journey of Independence
Williams’ career arced towards self-sufficiency. Following a period in the bustling Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, making a home in Portland in 1991, and later relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the great promise of the internet
