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

While browsing the jazz aisle at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, artist Kye Potter discovered a battered tape by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It seemed like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he says. "It was personally duplicated, with printed inserts, a touch of highlighter 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 intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt unusual from Williams, who was most famous for making sparkling jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a sonic explorer – during her performances, she requested pianos with the top removed to make it easier to reach inside and play the strings directly – it was a facet that infrequently appeared on her albums.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to ask if further recordings had been made. She sent back four recordings of altered piano from the 1980s – two performance tapes, two made in the studio. And though she had ceased playing publicly years earlier, she also shared some newer material. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – complete albums," Potter recounts.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams during the Covid pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was released in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. She was 73. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter reveals. Williams had been open regarding her difficulties following spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "But I think her character, fortitude, assurance and the serenity she found through her spiritual pursuits all shone through in conversation."

In later electronic, groove-focused 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 escape convention. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano resonances, shows that that drive reached back decades. In place of a consistent piano sound, the piano creates a multitude of sonic impressions: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, far-off chimes, creatures in enclosures, and small devices spluttering into life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with massive roars dissolving into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Guitarist Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the force of her music, but knew little of her dreamlike prepared piano prior to this release. Not long after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Now that seems completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Technical Precursors

These modified tones have technical precursors: think of John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the groundbreaking approaches of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how masterfully she blends these new sounds with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The stylistic approach rarely departs from that which she developed in a body of work spanning more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are powered by the bubbling vitality of an performer in complete command. That's electrifying music.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams had always experimented with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she reportedly said. She was given her first home piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she shared the anecdote of her first "disassembling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she noted: Williams took off a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor alongside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she wrote.

Initially, Williams studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for embellishing a section. However, he detected her potential: the next week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

In time, Brubeck refer to Williams "one of the greatest 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 immersion in jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her long journeys to learn about 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 disenchanted with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "boys’ club," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of securing work – and of a corporate industry profiting from the work of struggling artists.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of core values," she stated in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, direct, openly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans individual. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her chosen artistic field for a period, imagine what kind of inhumane bullshit she must have endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

Forging an Autonomous Career

The artist's trajectory moved toward self-sufficiency. After time in the bustling Bay Area scene, she moved through 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 huge potential of the internet