"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."
"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."
Kye Potter discovered a battered homemade tape of Jessica Williams’s Prepared Piano in a record shop and traced further recordings and synth tapes directly to her. Williams, known for straight-ahead jazz in the tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner, also experimented live by requesting pianos without their covers to strum and alter the strings. She sent Potter four prepared-piano recordings from the mid-1980s and additional synth releases. Potter worked with Williams during the Covid pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, released on Pre-Echo Press in late 2025. Williams died in 2022 at 73 while the project remained unfinished and faced physical and financial struggles late in life.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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