'An Unprecedented Discovery': The Prepared Piano Revelations of Pianist Jessica Williams

Perusing the jazz records at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, artist Kye Potter came across a worn cassette by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It looked like the classic independent effort. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he recalls. "It was copied at home, with photocopied notes, a touch of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector particularly interested in the U.S. experimental scene post John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed atypical for Williams, who was most famous for making sparkling jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a musical experimenter – for her concerts, she requested pianos lacking the lid to allow her to reach inside and strum the strings – it was a dimension that seldom found its way on her albums.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to see if further recordings existed. She responded with four recordings of modified piano from the 1980s – two performance tapes, two studio creations. Although she had long since retired years earlier, she also shared some recent work. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – entire projects," Potter recounts.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams in the pandemic era to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was issued 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 open regarding her difficulties after spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "Yet I feel her character, fortitude, assurance and the peace she found through meditative practices all shone through in conversation."

Within her more recent synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – explicitly categorized "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a artist seeking to escape tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano echoes, demonstrates that that impulse stretched back decades. Rather than a consistent piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic evocations: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, creatures in enclosures, and tiny engines spluttering into life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with monumental roars giving way to biting, staccato riffs.

Listener Praise

Guitarist Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the intensity of her music, but knew little of her dreamlike prepared piano before this release. Soon after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Now that seems completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Historical Influences

Her altered piano techniques have technical precursors: think of John Cage’s modified instruments, or the groundbreaking approaches of American eccentric Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how effectively she merges these new sounds with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. Her musical speech rarely departs from that which she developed in a discography extending to more than 80 albums, so that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are driven by the bubbling vitality of an artist in full control. That's thrilling stuff.

A Constant Innovator

Williams consistently experimented with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she reportedly said. She was given her first vertical piano in 1954. In her writings, she shared the anecdote of her first "taking apart" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she commented: Williams detached a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor beside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she wrote.

Williams originally learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for improvising a section. However, he detected her potential: the following week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Brubeck would later call Williams "a top-tier 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 absorption in jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her dedicated efforts to study the genre – first, to the more modern styles 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.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a strident, public critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "boys’ club," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of securing work – 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 incapacity to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she wrote in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, direct, openly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans woman. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her desired musical domain 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

Her professional path evolved into self-sufficiency. Following a period in the active Bay Area scene, she relocated to 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 recognized early the huge potential of the internet