Dave Brubeck called her a great and Mary Lou Williams gave her advice. But the prodigy grew frustrated with jazz, quit and started dismantling her instrument. A superb new reissue showcases her findings
F
lipping 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.
