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Flipping through the jazz section on a visit to his local record store a few years ago, artist Kye Potter found a battered tape by American pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It looked every bit the quintessential DIY release. “The labels had come off the tape,” he says. “It was home-dubbed, with photocopied notes, a little bit of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art.”
As a collector and occasional producer particularly interested in the American musical avant garde after John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape called Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed unusual from Williams, who was best known for making sparkling jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner. If the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a musical experimenter – for her concerts, she requested pianos without the cover to make it easier to reach inside and strum the strings – it was a facet that rarely made it to her records.
“I’d never heard anything like it,” Potter says of the tape. So he emailed Williams to see if any more records existed. She sent back four recordings of prepared piano from the mid 1980s – two live, two made in the studio. And though she had long since retired from playing publicly, she also included some recent work. “She sent me probably 15 or 16 synth tapes – full releases,” says Potter.
Potter worked with Williams during the Covid pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was released on artist Matt Connors’s Pre-Echo Press in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. She was 73. “She was struggling physically and financially,” Potter says. Williams had been public about her difficulties after spinal surgery in 2012, meaning she could no longer tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. “But I think her personality, strength, self-confidence and the calmness she found through having a spiritual practice all came out in conversation.”
In later electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – defiantly tagged “NOT JAZZ” on the genre-sceptic’s website – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a pianist trying to break free of expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano reverberations, reveals that that impulse stretched back decades. Rather than a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, distant church bells, animals rattling around cages, and little machines spluttering into life. It has a tremendously urgent energy, monumental roars collapsing into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.
Tortoise’s Jeff Parker tells me he is a fan of this “gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced” record. Jessika Kenney, a vocalist and composer who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the intensity of her music, but knew little of her surreal-sounding prepared piano until this release. Not long after seeing Williams live, she went to Indonesia, seeking “surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan”, she recalls. “Now that seems completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was known to me then.”
Williams’ prepared sounds have technical precursors: think of John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the radical techniques of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how successfully she fuses these new sounds with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The language rarely departs from that she developed in a discography stretching to more than 80 albums, meaning the new psychedelically coloured sounds are powered by the fizzy energy of an improviser in full control. It’s thrilling stuff.
Williams had always experimented with the piano. “I hit the notes, and I saw colours,” she told NPR’s Terry Gross in 1997. She received her first upright piano in 1954. On Currents, the long-running blog she kept (miraculously preserved by the Internet Archive), she told the story of her first “disassembling” – “as I’ve done for all pianos”, she noted: Williams took off a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor beside her stool. “I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot,” she wrote.
Williams originally studied 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. But he saw her potential: the next week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.
Brubeck would later call Williams “one of the greatest 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 long journeys to educate herself in 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 disillusioned with the jazz world.
After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams when the latter played a week at the Keystone Corner. Buoyed up by the elder pianist’s advice (“Don’t ever let anyone stop you”), she became a strident, public critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz “boys’ club”, the “jazz hang” – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of getting gigs – and of a corporate industry riding on the coattails of struggling artists.
“I am continually disappointed at the reality 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 liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog is wide-ranging, unflinching, expressly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a transgender woman. As John Corbett noted recently in German magazine JazzPodium: “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 endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s.”
Williams’ career arced towards self-sufficiency. After time in the bustling Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling in Portland in 1991, moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams saw early on the huge potential of the internet “to change human consciousness beyond anything experienced during the Industrial Revolution”, as she wrote, and also to help establish herself as an independent artist. By the late 90s, she used her own website to blog, run another record label, (Red and Blue Recordings), ship records, and maintain a mailing list of dedicated fans, who attended concerts – often given in people’s homes.
Even after she sold her piano to pay for her spinal surgery and retreated from performing publicly, she continued to make music: not jazz (“when it stopped being fun playing jazz, I stopped doing it,” she wrote in 2018) but on synthesisers. “That makes me happy – as a hobby.” After her death, some in the online jazz community remarked that her passing had gone virtually unnoticed. Now, there’s a sense that a Williams revival may be beginning. For starters, Potter and Conners are contemplating a more blues-focused prepared piano project. “Music just flowed out of Jessica her whole life,” says Potter. Even in death, the sense is she’s not quite finished.
