'I'd Never Heard Anything Like It': Those Prepared Piano Discoveries of Pianist Jessica Williams

Perusing the jazz aisle at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, producer Kye Potter discovered a battered tape by musician Jessica Williams. It looked like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he notes. "It was copied at home, with xeroxed liners, a touch of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector keenly focused on the American musical avant garde following John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt out of character for Williams, who was most famous for producing sparkling jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the West Coast scene knew her as a musical experimenter – for her concerts, she requested pianos with the top removed to allow her to access the interior and pluck the strings – it was a dimension that seldom found its way on her albums.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to see if any more recordings had been made. She sent back four recordings of modified piano from the mid-80s – two concert recordings, two recorded in a studio. And though she had ceased playing publicly previously, she also included some newer material. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synth tapes – complete albums," Potter explains.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams in the pandemic era to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was released in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, part way through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter states. Williams had been open regarding her hardships after spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "But I think her personality, strength, self-confidence and the serenity she found through meditative practices all were evident in conversation."

In her subsequent synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – boldly labeled "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a pianist attempting to escape expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano reverberations, reveals that that impulse reached back decades. In place of a homogenous piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic associations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, remote carillons, beasts in pens, and little machines coughing to start. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with colossal bellows collapsing into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Listener Praise

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the force of her music, but knew little of her otherworldly prepared piano prior to this release. Soon after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Now that seems completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Historical Influences

These modified tones have artistic antecedents: consider John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the innovative methods of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how successfully she blends these novel textures with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The stylistic approach rarely departs from that which she cultivated in a body of work stretching to more than 80 albums, so that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are fueled by the effervescent force of an artist in complete command. This is exhilarating material.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams consistently tinkered with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she noted in an interview. She was given her first vertical piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she recounted the tale of her first "taking apart" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she commented: Williams removed a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor alongside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she stated.

Williams originally learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she brought 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 mastered his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Brubeck would later call Williams "one of the greatest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was just as awed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, exhibits her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. However, despite her extensive studies to study the genre – first, to the more modern styles of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before tracing a path back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she soon grew disappointed with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of securing work – and of a corporate industry benefiting from the efforts of struggling artists.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she wrote in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was eclectic, unflinching, openly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans individual. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her preferred musical arena for a period, imagine what kind of terrible treatment she must have endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

Her professional path evolved into self-sufficiency. After time in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she lived in smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling in Portland in 1991, and later going to a more remote location, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams saw early on the great promise of the internet