Flipping through the jazz records at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, producer Kye Potter came across a worn cassette by musician Jessica Williams. It looked like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had come off the tape," he recalls. "It was home-dubbed, with xeroxed liners, a little bit of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."
Being a collector particularly interested in the American musical avant garde after John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt unusual from Williams, who was best known for creating lively jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.
Although the West Coast scene knew her as a sonic explorer – at her live shows, she required pianos with the top removed to allow her to access the interior and pluck the strings – it was a aspect that seldom found its way on her albums.
"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to ask if further recordings had been made. She sent back four recordings of modified piano from the mid 1980s – two performance tapes, two recorded in a studio. Even though she had ceased playing publicly some time before, she also enclosed some contemporary pieces. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – entire projects," Potter explains.
Potter collaborated with Williams during the Covid pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was published in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, midway through the project. She was 73. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter says. Williams had been public about her hardships after spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "However, I believe her personality, strength, self-confidence and the calmness she found through her spiritual pursuits all shone through in conversation."
Within her more recent 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 pianist seeking to escape convention. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano reverberations, reveals that that drive stretched back decades. In place of a consistent piano sound, the instrument creates a multitude of sonic associations: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, animals rattling around cages, and small devices sparking to life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with monumental roars giving way to growling, sharply accented riffs.
Guitarist Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the force of her music, but had scant knowledge of her otherworldly prepared piano prior to this release. Not long after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."
These modified tones have artistic antecedents: reflect on John Cage’s modified instruments, or the groundbreaking approaches of American eccentric Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how effectively she fuses these novel textures with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The language hardly ever strays from that which she cultivated in a discography spanning more than 80 albums, meaning the new psychedelically coloured sounds are fueled by the effervescent force of an artist in complete command. It’s electrifying music.
Williams had always experimented with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she once explained. She received her first home piano in 1954. On her blog, she told the story of her first "dismantling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she noted: Williams took off a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor beside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she stated.
Early on, Williams learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for embellishing a section. However, he detected her potential: the following week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.
Subsequently, Brubeck refer to 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 immersion in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her dedicated efforts to learn about the genre – first, to the more modern styles of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before working her way back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she rapidly felt disappointed with the jazz world.
Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "old boys' network," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of landing performances – and of a commercial business benefiting from the efforts of financially strained musicians.
"I remain constantly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she penned in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was eclectic, honest, openly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans individual. A writer pointed out: "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 suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."
Her professional path evolved into self-sufficiency. After time in the active Bay Area scene, she relocated to 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 saw early on the huge potential of the internet
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