Jessica Williams, a jazz pianist and composer of extraordinary talent and imagination whose style touched on bebop, fusion and the avant-garde, died on March 10, She was 73.
Williams was a mystery to many jazz fans and jazz writers—a name heard every so often but an artist who was rarely heard on the radio and TV or live around the country. Intensely sensitive and private, she was averse to touring and preferred keeping to herself. Her keyboard approach was flavored by the styles of multiple jazz legends, including Thelonious Monk and Art Tatum.
Born in Baltimore in 1948, Williams started taking piano lessons at age 4 and studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory of Music. For Williams, the sounds of the piano were internalized as colors, which deeply influenced her approach. After college, she moved to Philadelphia, where she was married to a cab driver who, she said in an interview, had hopes of becoming a trumpet player. She spent seven years in the city practicing and performing, most notably a five-month stint with the Philly Joe Jones Quintet.
When she was 28, in 1977, she moved to the Bay Area of San Francisco and played regularly at Keystone Korner. She next moved to Seattle and then Sacramento, Calif., in what she said was a search for a healthy lifestyle following a struggle with substance abuse. Williams also was seeking an unassuming life and steady work on the concert stage. In November 1989, Jessica married Duncan Atherton, and the two remained together.
Williams was so withdrawn from the public or overlooked that it's difficult to find interviews with her online or on YouTube. But there were three important ones—her appearance on Piano Jazz hosted by Marian McPartland in 1992, NPR's Fresh Air hosted by Terry Gross in 2002, and a 2007 sit-down, on-camera interview with the BBC in Brecon, Wales, during which she said she hadn't had a drink or a cigarette in 10 years. Links to these interviews appear at the end of this post.
By the 2000s, Williams was performing at many jazz festivals abroad. Over the course of her career, she composed more than 200 songs, recorded more than 50 albums and was a prolific grant writer. She received two from the National Endowment for the Arts; a Rockefeller Grant for composing; the Alice B. Toklas Grant for Women Composers, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship.
Williams died of atherosclerotic heart disease, according to her husband Duncan. Devoted entirely to her music, Williams was a beautiful candle in the wind.
Here are my 10 favorite Jessica Williams clps:
Here's Plath's Return from Jessica's first album, The Portal of Antrim in 1976...
Here's Return to the Portal of Antrim from Williams' second album, Rivers of Memory, in 1977, on which she played piano, electric piano, organ synthesizer and drums....
Here's Williams's I Remember Bill, a tribute to Bill Evans, from her album At Maybeck, recorded live at the Maybeck Recital Hall in Berkeley, Calif., in February 1992...
Here's When Your Lover Has Gone, from Williams's Higher Standards in 1996...
Here's Solitude, from the same album in 1996...
Here's Alone Together from Live At Yoshi's, Volume 1 in 2003...
Here's Simple Things (for Dexter Gordon) from Solo Piano Compositions released in 2007...
Here's Miles to Go from Jessica Williams's Virtual Miles in 2007...
And here's Wise One from Touch in 2010...
Bonus: Here are Williams's three key interviews:
To listen to Williams's appearance on Piano Jazz with Marian McPartland in 1992, go here.
To listen to Williams on Fresh Air with Terry Gross in 2002, go here.
And here's Williams being interviewed by Julian Joseph on the BBC in 2007...
