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

While browsing the jazz records at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, producer Kye Potter came across a battered tape by American pianist Jessica Williams. It looked like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he recalls. "It was copied at home, with photocopied notes, a dab of fluorescent marker to emphasize the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector particularly interested in the avant-garde movement post John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt unusual from Williams, who was primarily recognized for making vibrant jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a creative innovator – at her live shows, she asked for pianos lacking the lid to make it easier to get inside and pluck the strings – it was a aspect 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 see if additional recordings were available. She responded with four recordings of modified piano from the mid 1980s – two concert recordings, two studio creations. Although she had ceased playing publicly some time before, she also enclosed some recent work. "She sent me around 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – entire projects," Potter explains.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams during the Covid pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was published in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter states. Williams had been open regarding her struggles after spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "However, I believe her character, fortitude, assurance and the serenity she found through her spiritual pursuits all came out in conversation."

In later 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 musician trying to transcend convention. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano reverberations, shows that that impulse reached back decades. Rather than a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates a multitude of sonic impressions: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, distant church bells, animals rattling around cages, and little machines spluttering into life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with massive roars collapsing into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Musician Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the power of her music, but had scant knowledge of her otherworldly prepared piano until this release. Shortly after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Historical Influences

Williams’ prepared sounds have artistic antecedents: consider John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the innovative methods of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how effectively she blends these innovative timbres with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The stylistic approach rarely departs from that which she developed in a discography extending to more than 80 albums, so that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are fueled by the fizzy energy of an improviser in complete command. This is exhilarating material.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Throughout her life, Williams tinkered with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she once explained. She was given her first upright piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she told the story of her first "dismantling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she commented: Williams took off a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor next to her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she stated.

Early on, Williams studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the classical repertoire 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.

Frustration with the Scene

Subsequently, Brubeck call Williams "among the finest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was equally admiring. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, displays her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her long journeys 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 disillusioned with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became 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 getting gigs – and of a profit-driven sector profiting from the work of financially strained musicians.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she stated in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was eclectic, unflinching, expressly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans woman. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her preferred musical arena for a period, imagine what kind of terrible treatment she must have suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

Williams’ career evolved into self-sufficiency. Following a period in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she moved through 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 understood from the beginning the immense possibilities of the internet