'I'd Never Heard Anything Like It': Those Prepared Piano Revelations of Pianist Jessica Williams

While browsing the jazz aisle at a local record store a few years ago, producer Kye Potter came across a well-used recording by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It appeared like the classic independent effort. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he notes. "It was copied at home, with xeroxed liners, a touch of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector deeply fascinated by the avant-garde movement following John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt out of character for Williams, who was best known for creating lively jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the California jazz community knew her as a musical experimenter – at her live shows, she requested pianos lacking the lid to allow her to reach inside and play the strings directly – it was a facet that rarely made it on her releases.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to ask if any more recordings had been made. She provided four recordings of prepared piano from the 1980s – two live, two studio creations. And though she had stepped away from public performance some time before, she also enclosed some contemporary pieces. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synth tapes – complete albums," Potter explains.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams in the pandemic era to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was released in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter reveals. Williams had been public about her struggles after spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "Yet I feel her character, fortitude, assurance and the peace she found through having a spiritual practice all shone through in conversation."

In her subsequent electronic, groove-focused 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 break free of expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano reverberations, demonstrates that that desire stretched back decades. Rather than a consistent piano sound, the instrument creates numerous distinct sonic impressions: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, remote carillons, beasts in pens, and small devices sparking to life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with colossal bellows collapsing into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Listener Praise

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the intensity of her music, but was largely unaware of her dreamlike prepared piano until this release. Not long after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Now that seems completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Historical Influences

These modified tones have technical precursors: consider John Cage’s modified instruments, or the innovative methods of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how masterfully she merges these novel textures with her own soulful language at the keyboard. Her musical speech rarely departs from that which she cultivated in a catalog extending to more than 80 albums, so that the new trippily tinted sounds are fueled by the bubbling vitality of an artist in complete command. This is exhilarating material.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams had always explored the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she once explained. She obtained her first vertical 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. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she explained.

Initially, Williams studied 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 scolded her for embellishing a section. Yet he recognized 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 "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, exhibits 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 moving backwards to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she soon grew disenchanted with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered 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 "male-dominated sphere," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of securing work – and of a commercial business riding on the coattails of struggling artists.

"I am continually disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she penned in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, direct, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a transgender woman. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her preferred musical arena for a period, imagine what kind of inhumane bullshit she must have suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

The artist's trajectory evolved into self-sufficiency. Following a period 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 going to a more remote location, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams understood from the beginning the great promise of the internet