From Leonard Feather's November 11, 1961 Downbeat blindfold test with pianist, composer, arranger, conductor André Previn:
The Records 1. Ornette Coleman. Focus on Sanity (from The Shape of Jazz to Come, Atlantic). Coleman, alto saxophone.
“Of course, it’s Rudy Wiedoeft, right? [A virtuoso American saxophonist whose compositions and solos on recordings helped popularize the instrument]. Laughs!
Well, I’ll tell you. I have never heard Ornette in a club. I understand strange and wonderful things happen that don’t happen on a record. So much has been said about Ornette by so many different cats that he has been built into something so untouchable that everyone walks around on tiptoes, excusing their opinions by all kinds of qualifications, which are then taken back in the privacy of a living room.
Since there is no particular need for me to ingratiate myself with the quorum of people who dig this, I may as well be totally blunt. Basing it on this record, which I’ve never heard before, and allowing for the fact that I've never heard a whole evening of Ornette, the worst thing I can say about it is not that I hate it or that I think it’s pretentious or anything, but the one thing that nobody has said about Ornette—and that is that it is an unmitigated bore! This has nothing to do with being adventurous or nonadventurous, new paths or new frontiers; it’s just a terrible bore. If someone is bent on broadening that which has come before . . . developing upon precedents, then I’m for it, but turning your back on any tradition is anarchy. It’s one thing to develop time and get it away from 4/4; it's another to broaden the field of abstract improvisation and not worry about changes. But just to turn your back on them is no excuse. It's a private world which literally no one can enter.
If any art form — and I'm not restricting this to music — has to be explained before and after— with all these learned articles about what he is going to prove and what he just proved — I’m damned if I can hear it while the music’s being played. I am as vituperative about this as you can possibly get. . . . This whole thing with Ornette, which started out as a fascinating experiment, has been built into something it is not, and Ornette himself has begun in interviews to intellectualize to an extent it simply can’t take. His personality is not such that could warrant his being called a fake. I understand Ornette is deeply serious about this, and perhaps in his own mind, he knows the goal he’s after. In terms of communicating, he is a million miles from achieving that goal. I'm not suggesting he try to reach the masses. I can’t imagine there are more than a handful of people, who are afraid of missing the boat as they did on Bird, who really seriously dig this. If there are. I am happy to be an outsider and to be labeled backward and old-fashioned.
Musicologically. I see nothing in it. Possibly, if the lines were played more cleanly, I might get a little out of it, but I think it’s giving this too much credit even to analyze it as long as I have. It’s a bore, self-indulgence, and utter nonsense."
“George Avakian’s sleeve note recounted the story of Brubeck—by then a father of five—calling him from a phone booth in Disneyland during a family outing. Had things panned out in accordance with their initial telephone conversation, Columbia would have released an album called Jazz Goes to Disneyland, with a front cover featuring all five Brubeck children posing next to a Disneyland exhibit alongside their father’s quartet. But rights issues (Disney already owned their own Disneyland record label) and someone’s suggestion for an attractively alliterative album title handed us the record we know: Dave Digs Disney, with, on its front cover, a beaming Dave surrounded by pencil sketches of Mickey Mouse, Pluto, and Donald Duck."
This is from the theguardian.com /2026/jan/05 and was sent to me by a Jazz buddy.
‘I’d never heard anything like it’: the prepared piano revelations of jazz star Jessica Williams
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
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.
Prepared precursor … John Cage changing the tuning of his piano by placing coins and screws between the strings in 1949. Photograph: New York Times Co./Getty Images
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 becimbaloms, 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.”
Jessica Williams: Blue Abstraction – video
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.
Tireless experimenter … Jessica Williams in Oakland, 1986. Photograph: PR
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.”
Unflinching … Jessica Williams. Photograph: Peter Symes/Redferns
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.
Flight To Jordan is a minor-mode theme melodically patterned along the lines of the spiritual Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho. The 32-bar chorus has an A-B-A-B pattern. Veteran Jordan fans will recall that Duke recorded it originally for a now-defunct label. The new treatment has a brighter tempo and maintains a consistent groove throughout the solos by Reece, Turrentine and Jordan. The mood established by Turrentine puts to valuable use both his tonal reflection of Coleman Hawkins and his stylistic debt to Sonny Rollins.
"When I heard Erroll Garner's recording of the tune, it quickly became my very favorite recording. I wonder why I didn't write it that way —by which I mean I had a fairly brisk tempo in mind, whereas Erroll just took it very gently, he kind of lagged it along and scraped his way through it, so much so that you can almost hear the smile on his face as he's playing. In fact, my nickname for Erroll was always "the Scraper."
I first heard Erroll Garner on record in about 1945, and my thoughts about him have never really changed from that moment. I said to myself, "This is an astoundingly original style!""
The following is excerpted from George’s aptly-titled autobiography Lullaby of Birdland [New York: Continuum Books, 2004].
“In 1952, Morris Levy, who owned Birdland, which had opened on the site of the Clique [on 52nd St.], came to me and said they were about to start a regular disc jockey show sponsored by the club.
Morris wanted me to record a theme, to be played every hour on the hour, and he sent the music to me. It wasn't much good.
Writing [an alternative] tune wasn't quite as straightforward as I had expected. I sat down and wrote something, but when I played it for my wife Trixie, she said, "This is terrible."
So for two days I thought the thing over. For some reason my mind went blank and although I wanted to write a song, I just couldn't think of anything. Finally I got to the point where I thought there was nothing for it but to send in the piece I'd written that Trixie reckoned was so awful.
That night, at our house in Old Tappan, New Jersey, where Trixie and I had moved not long before all this happened, I was sitting down to dinner, my favorite char-broiled steak. I'd just started to eat when I jumped up.
Trixie said, "What's wrong with it?" thinking there was something amiss with the food, because sometimes I would jump up with a yell if there was something on my food that was unexpected or which I didn't like.
That night there was nothing wrong with the food. I rushed over to the piano and said, "How's this?" I sat down and played right through Lullaby of Birdland. It just came to me, the whole thing, just like that. Within ten minutes I'd got the entire song worked out. Since then I've been back to the same butcher several times and asked him if he could manage a repetition of that steak. Actually quite a lot of my compositions have come this way — very slow going for a week or so, and then the finished piece comes together very rapidly, but as I say to those who criticize this method of working, it's not that I dash something off in ten minutes, it's ten minutes plus umpteen years in the business.
If George Shearing has one unique musical attribute, it is his piano sound. No one has produced a more beautiful or crystalline sonority from the instrument. This is a subjective opinion, of course, because this writer is also a jazz pianist. I think Shearing is one of the most imaginative and sensitive ballad players of our time.
Not the least of his gifts is his harmonic imagination. All jazz pianists are forever searching for different ways to re-harmonize standards. We all have our pet substitute changes. Shearing, however, rivals Tatum, Hank Jones and Bill Evans in that department. Especially interesting is the way he handles inner voicings — his voice leading is impeccable. He has written many folios of his re-harmonizations, which are a wonderful reference for any musician who wants to expand his or her harmonic vocabulary. [emphasis mine]
