Blue Abstraction: Prepared Piano Project 1985–1987

In her lifetime, Jessica Williams was busy and prolific. From the vantage of being the house pianist at San Francisco’s legendary Keystone Korner, she shared the stage with the likes of Dexter Gordon, Stan Getz, Tony Williams, Charlie Haden, and Bobby Hutcherson (to name just a few) and her own discography topped 75 albums. But nothing is quite like the personal recordings she laid to tape in the mid-’80s, wherein she utilized the prepared piano strategies of John Cage and Henry Cowell to drastically alter the sounds of her 88 keys. Blue Abstraction finally brings this unheard element of Williams’s music to light. There’s a playfulness to Williams’s exploration of these alien new timbres of her keys, showcasing her Monk-indebted melodic sense and her deep-rooted understanding of the blues paired to a friskiness for new sounds. Just check the clacking dance of “Odun-de” or how the pensive clang of “Portrait of Matisse” turns dizzying. “The Spider” balances being both percussive and gossamer and tour de force “Half Circle Song” vacillates between Meade Lux Lewis boogie woogie and an alien musical form still beyond human understanding, finding common ground between such extremes.