One good pianist deserves another – and Jessica Williams was one of the finest. Appropriately enough, she recorded 'a solo tribute to Bill Evans', aptly entitled Joyful Sorrow because one feels such a similar aching sense of beauty and sadness while listening to both pianists. Not that Jessica Williams was a mere Bill Evans acolyte: she also recorded tributes to Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane among the sixty or so albums she made in her curtailed lifetime. In this extended solo performance there is, too, more than a hint of McCoy Tyner.
Although she recorded mainly in a solo capacity or within the classic piano-trio format, she told fellow jazz pianist Marian McPartland that her main influences were in fact horn players such as Coltrane and Miles Davis, and there's a certain sense of the latter's mid-period minimalist approach to jazz in 'Love and Hate'. It was recorded on the 6th January 2006 in Seattle on the Pacific west coast where she holed up for much of her career, which helps to explain why she remained so comparatively underrated and little known outside her adopted California and her native Baltimore. I forget how or when I first heard her, but remember buying her album Nothin' But The Truth when wandering the streets of Cologne with a baby girl strapped to my chest. Her mother was appearing in some obscure drama commissioned by S4C, the Welsh language TV channel, so I took the opportunity to bond with my perplexing infant daughter. Subsequently, I somehow managed to scratch the album's finest moment, the pianist's interpretation of Monk's 'Ugly Beauty'. It makes me doubly sad every time I listen to it.
The liner notes to the LP are typical of an artist who was rarely if ever flashy and who never took herself too seriously. 'I was born and raised in Baltimore,' she writes, 'studied the classics at the Peabody Conservatory there, started gigging at fifteen, and moved to Philadelphia in my twenties, where I played with the great "Philly Joe" Jones [late of Miles Davis's 1950s band] among others. The year 1978 saw me in San Francisco, where I became "house pianist" at the now-defunct Keystone Korner.' A star is born. You'll hear her classical roots at play here: If you created a Venn Diagram, elements of Debussy, Bill Evans and McCoy Tyner would intersect somewhere in the middle ground where jazz meets classical. Indeed, in the mid section of the piece – somewhere between the six-and-a-half and nine-and-a-half minute markers, before the repetitive Tyner-like motif returns – there seems to be a bit of Mozart thrown in for good measure.
It's all a bit on the mauve side and, at 13-plus minutes, it demands ones undivided attention and a certain patience, but since it appears to be the only live video of Jessica Williams at work on YouTube, it's a precious record of a true artist in the throes of creation. Take a few deep breaths and find a very quiet spot...
In the liner notes to Nothin' But The Truth, Jessica Williams writes with true insight about the process of performing music: 'When you play out "at" an audience, you perform... It's a one-way affair. When you play inward, the music becomes conversational, personal, and inventive; the audience is invited into the circle of cross-talk, and becomes an active participant in the process. Of course, this is asking something of our audience, in that their capacity to listen and assimilate our conversations is crucial.' Listen and watch. The camera's ability to home in on a subject adds a fascinating dimension, as we get to see in close-up how the pianists two hands work in tandem: the insistent left-hand motif builds a sense of underlying drama that threatens to undermine the delicate figures created by her busy right hand. Similar to Keith Jarrett in its meditative quality – except that Jessica Williams makes no verbal noise – the delicate, fragile beauty of her improvisation leaves an impression of something slightly Japanese about it: like a 'floating world' woodcut of the 19th century that's both of this world and beyond it. Typically, too, of this modest, somewhat unsung heroine, her quietly epic creation ends not with a showy rumpus, but with an understated treble note that resonates briefly, almost apologetically before the audience wakes from its trance.
She also vividly suggests what music meant to her – and probably to many of us who find it hard to articulate. 'Music is, to me, a great mansion; a palatial yet warmly-inviting mansion filled with art treasures, relics, trap-doors, hidden passage-ways, dark closets and sun-drenched reading rooms. Like a huge old house that you can live in for years and never know all of its secrets.' In 'Love And Hate', Jessica Williams takes us on an extended tour of that house, lingering mainly in the luminous reading rooms, but never shying away from the hidden passage-ways and dark closets.
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