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

Perusing the jazz aisle at a local record store a few years ago, producer Kye Potter discovered a well-used recording by musician Jessica Williams. It looked like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he notes. "It was home-dubbed, with photocopied notes, a touch of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector deeply fascinated by the avant-garde movement following John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed unusual from Williams, who was most famous for producing vibrant jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the California jazz community knew her as a creative innovator – at her live shows, she required pianos with the top removed to make it easier to get inside and pluck the strings – it was a dimension that rarely made it on her releases.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to inquire if further recordings were available. She sent back four recordings of altered piano from the 1980s – two concert recordings, two recorded in a studio. And though she had ceased playing publicly previously, she also included some recent work. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synth tapes – complete albums," Potter explains.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams throughout the pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was released in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, during the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter says. Williams had been open regarding her difficulties after 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 meditative practices all were evident in conversation."

Within her more recent 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 pianist trying to transcend convention. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano resonances, reveals that that desire reached back decades. Rather than a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates numerous distinct sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, far-off chimes, animals rattling around cages, and tiny engines spluttering into life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with monumental roars giving way to biting, staccato riffs.

Listener Praise

Musician Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has partnered 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 prior to this release. Soon after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Now that seems completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Historical Influences

These modified tones have technical precursors: think of John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the radical techniques of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how effectively she merges these novel textures with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The stylistic approach hardly ever strays from that which she cultivated in a catalog extending to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are driven by the bubbling vitality of an performer in full control. This is exhilarating material.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams consistently explored the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she reportedly said. She received her first home piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she told the story of her first "taking apart" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she noted: Williams took off a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor beside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she wrote.

Williams originally trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for altering a section. Yet he recognized her potential: a week later, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

In time, Brubeck describe Williams "among the finest 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 immersion in jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. However, despite her extensive studies to educate herself 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 quickly became disappointed with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of landing performances – and of a profit-driven sector profiting from the work of financially strained musicians.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she wrote in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, honest, openly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans 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 cruel nonsense she must have faced as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Williams’ career evolved into self-sufficiency. Following a period in the active Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling in Portland in 1991, and later moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams understood from the beginning the huge potential of the internet