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

Flipping through the jazz aisle at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, producer Kye Potter found a worn cassette by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It looked like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had detached from the tape," he says. "It was copied at home, with photocopied notes, a dab of fluorescent marker to highlight the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector keenly focused on the American musical avant garde after John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared out of character for Williams, who was best known for producing sparkling jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a sonic explorer – for her concerts, she asked for pianos without the cover to allow her to access the interior and strum the strings – it was a facet that seldom found its way on her albums.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to ask if additional recordings were available. She sent back four recordings of modified piano from the mid 1980s – two performance tapes, two studio creations. Even though she had ceased playing publicly some time before, she also enclosed some contemporary pieces. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synth tapes – full releases," Potter explains.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams throughout the pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was released in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, midway through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter says. Williams had been vocal concerning her hardships following spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "However, I believe her character, fortitude, assurance and the serenity she found through her spiritual pursuits all came out in conversation."

Within her more recent electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – boldly labeled "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a pianist trying to escape convention. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano echoes, demonstrates that that desire reached back decades. Rather than a uniform piano sound, the instrument creates a multitude of sonic associations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, remote carillons, creatures in enclosures, and tiny engines coughing to start. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with monumental roars giving way to snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw 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 before this release. Shortly after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Today, that appears completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Artistic Forebears

These modified tones have historical forerunners: think of John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the innovative methods of American eccentric Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how successfully she blends these new sounds with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The stylistic approach scarcely deviates from that which she honed in a discography stretching to more than 80 albums, so that the new trippily tinted sounds are driven by the effervescent force of an artist in total mastery. This is electrifying music.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Throughout her life, Williams explored the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she once explained. She received her first upright piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she recounted the tale of her first "dismantling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she wrote: Williams detached a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor alongside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she stated.

Initially, Williams studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for altering a section. However, he detected her potential: the following week, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

In time, Brubeck describe Williams "a top-tier pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was equally admiring. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, shows her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her long journeys to learn about the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before working her way back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she quickly became disenchanted with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "boys’ club," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of landing performances – and of a profit-driven sector profiting from the work of financially strained musicians.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure 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 was wide-ranging, unflinching, expressly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans woman. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her chosen artistic field for a period, imagine what kind of cruel nonsense she must have endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

Williams’ career evolved into self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the bustling Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, moving to Portland in 1991, and later relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams understood from the beginning the immense possibilities of the internet