While browsing the jazz aisle at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, artist Kye Potter came across a battered tape by musician Jessica Williams. It appeared like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had come off the tape," he recalls. "It was personally duplicated, with xeroxed liners, a dab of fluorescent marker to highlight the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."
Being a collector particularly interested in the American musical avant garde post John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt atypical for Williams, who was primarily recognized for creating vibrant jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.
If the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a sonic explorer – during her performances, she required pianos lacking the lid to allow her to access the interior and strum the strings – it was a aspect that rarely made it on her records.
"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to see if further recordings existed. She sent back four recordings of modified piano from the 1980s – two live, two made in the studio. Although she had ceased playing publicly years earlier, she also shared some contemporary pieces. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – full releases," Potter recounts.
Potter worked with Williams in the pandemic era to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces 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 says. Williams had been open regarding her struggles after spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "However, I believe her personality, strength, self-confidence and the peace she found through her spiritual pursuits all shone through in conversation."
Within her more recent 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 artist trying to transcend convention. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano echoes, demonstrates that that drive extended back decades. Rather than a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates numerous distinct sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, distant church bells, beasts in pens, and small devices coughing to start. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with colossal bellows giving way to snarling, highly punctuated riffs.
Musician Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the force of her music, but had scant knowledge of her surreal-sounding prepared piano prior to this release. Not long after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."
These modified tones have technical precursors: reflect on John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the radical techniques of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how masterfully she fuses these new sounds with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The language scarcely deviates from that which she developed in a discography extending to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new trippily tinted sounds are driven by the effervescent force of an artist in complete command. That's electrifying music.
Throughout her life, Williams experimented with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she noted in an interview. She received her first home 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 removed a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor alongside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she stated.
Williams originally trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she brought 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 introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.
Subsequently, Brubeck describe Williams "a top-tier 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 absorption in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. However, despite her long journeys to educate herself 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 quickly became disappointed with the jazz world.
After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of landing performances – and of a commercial business profiting from the work of struggling artists.
"I am repeatedly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she stated in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, unflinching, openly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans individual. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her chosen artistic field for a period, imagine what kind of cruel nonsense she must have suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."
The artist's trajectory moved toward self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the bustling Bay Area scene, she relocated to smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, making a home in Portland in 1991, and later moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams saw early on the immense possibilities of the internet
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