'It Was Utterly Unique': The Prepared Piano Discoveries of Jazz Star Jessica Williams

Flipping through the jazz records at a local record store a few years ago, artist Kye Potter found a worn cassette by musician Jessica Williams. It looked like the classic independent effort. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he notes. "It was copied at home, with printed inserts, a little bit of highlighter to accentuate 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 intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared atypical for Williams, who was most famous for producing sparkling jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the West Coast scene knew her as a sonic explorer – during her performances, she requested pianos without the cover to facilitate to reach inside and pluck the strings – it was a facet that rarely made it on her records.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to ask if any more recordings had been made. She sent back four recordings of modified piano from the mid-80s – two concert recordings, two made in the studio. Although she had long since retired years earlier, she also shared some recent work. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – full releases," Potter explains.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams throughout the pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was issued in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter reveals. Williams had been public about her hardships after spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "But I think her personality, strength, self-confidence and the peace she found through having a spiritual practice all came out in conversation."

In her subsequent 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 pianist trying to transcend expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano reverberations, reveals that that drive stretched back decades. In place of a homogenous piano sound, the piano creates numerous distinct sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, creatures in enclosures, and tiny engines spluttering into life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with massive roars giving way to growling, sharply accented riffs.

Artistic Recognition

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))), experienced Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the intensity of her music, but knew little of her surreal-sounding prepared piano until this release. Shortly after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Today, that appears completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Technical Precursors

Williams’ prepared sounds have artistic antecedents: consider John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the innovative methods of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how successfully she fuses these innovative timbres with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. Her musical speech rarely departs from that which she cultivated in a catalog extending to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new trippily tinted sounds are driven by the bubbling vitality of an improviser in total mastery. That's thrilling stuff.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams had always tinkered with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she reportedly said. She received her first vertical piano in 1954. In her writings, she shared the anecdote of her first "disassembling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she wrote: Williams removed a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor beside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she stated.

Early on, Williams learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for altering a section. However, he detected her potential: the following week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

In time, Brubeck describe 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, shows her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. However, despite her extensive studies to study 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 rapidly felt disappointed with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a strident, public critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "old boys' network," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of getting gigs – and of a commercial business riding on the coattails of artists in need.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of core values," she penned in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, unflinching, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans woman. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her preferred musical arena 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."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

The artist's trajectory moved toward 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 relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the immense possibilities of the internet