'An Unprecedented Discovery': Those Prepared Piano Revelations of Jazz Star Jessica Williams

Flipping through the jazz aisle at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, collector Kye Potter discovered a well-used recording by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It seemed like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he recalls. "It was home-dubbed, with printed inserts, a little bit of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector deeply fascinated by the avant-garde movement after John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt atypical for Williams, who was most famous for making vibrant jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the California jazz community knew her as a sonic explorer – for her concerts, she requested pianos without the cover to make it easier to reach inside and play the strings directly – it was a dimension that rarely made it on her records.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to see if further recordings existed. She responded with four recordings of altered piano from the mid-80s – two performance tapes, two made in the studio. Even though she had stepped away from public performance previously, she also enclosed some contemporary pieces. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – full releases," Potter explains.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams throughout the pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was issued in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter says. Williams had been vocal concerning her difficulties after spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "Yet I feel her personality, strength, self-confidence and the serenity she found through having a spiritual practice all were evident in conversation."

Within her more recent synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – defiantly tagged "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a artist trying to transcend convention. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano resonances, demonstrates that that desire extended back decades. Instead of a uniform piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic associations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, beasts in pens, and small devices sparking to life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with colossal bellows collapsing into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Guitarist Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the force of her music, but had scant knowledge of her otherworldly prepared piano before this release. Shortly after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Technical Precursors

Williams’ prepared sounds have artistic antecedents: consider John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the radical techniques of American eccentric Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how masterfully she merges these innovative timbres with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The language rarely departs from that which she cultivated in a catalog stretching to more than 80 albums, so that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are fueled by the fizzy energy of an improviser in total mastery. That's thrilling stuff.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams had always experimented with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she reportedly said. She obtained her first upright piano in 1954. On her blog, she recounted the tale of her first "disassembling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she noted: Williams detached a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor beside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she explained.

Williams originally studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for embellishing a section. However, he detected her potential: the next week, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

Brubeck would later describe Williams "a top-tier pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was similarly impressed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, exhibits her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Yet, despite her dedicated efforts to study the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches 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 was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a strident, public critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "old boys' network," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of securing work – and of a commercial business benefiting from the efforts of financially strained musicians.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she penned in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was eclectic, unflinching, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans individual. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that drove 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."

Forging an Autonomous Career

Williams’ career evolved into self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she relocated to smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, making a home in Portland in 1991, and later moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams saw early on the immense possibilities of the internet