'It Was Utterly Unique': The Prepared Piano Revelations of Pianist Jessica Williams

While browsing the jazz aisle at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, producer Kye Potter found a worn cassette by musician Jessica Williams. It seemed like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had come off the tape," he says. "It was personally duplicated, with xeroxed liners, a little bit of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector particularly interested in the U.S. experimental scene post John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed out of character for Williams, who was primarily recognized for making lively jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a sonic explorer – at her live shows, she requested pianos with the top removed to make it easier to reach inside and strum the strings – it was a dimension that infrequently appeared on her albums.

"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 altered piano from the mid 1980s – two performance tapes, two made in the studio. And though she had stepped away from public performance some time before, she also included some recent work. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – complete albums," Potter recounts.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams during the Covid pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was released in late 2025. However, 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 struggles after spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "Yet I feel her character, fortitude, assurance and the serenity she found through having a spiritual practice all were evident in conversation."

In her subsequent 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 attempting to escape convention. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano echoes, demonstrates that that desire reached back decades. In place of a homogenous piano sound, the piano creates numerous distinct sonic associations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, distant church bells, creatures in enclosures, and small devices coughing to start. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with monumental roars giving way to growling, sharply accented riffs.

Listener Praise

Musician Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the force of her music, but had scant knowledge of her dreamlike prepared piano prior to this release. Not long after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Historical Influences

These modified tones have artistic antecedents: consider John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the innovative methods of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how masterfully she blends these novel textures with her own soulful language at the keyboard. Her musical speech hardly ever strays from that which she developed in a discography spanning more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are fueled by the bubbling vitality of an improviser in total mastery. This is electrifying music.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams consistently tinkered with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she reportedly said. She received her first upright piano in 1954. In her writings, she told the story of her first "dismantling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she wrote: Williams detached a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor alongside her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she wrote.

Early on, Williams learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for improvising a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the next week, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

Subsequently, Brubeck refer to 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, displays her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Yet, despite her extensive studies to educate herself the genre – first, to the more modern styles of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before working her way back 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 met the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up 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 poor compensation, the jazz "boys’ club," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of landing performances – and of a profit-driven sector benefiting from the efforts of struggling artists.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she wrote in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, unflinching, expressly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed 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 terrible treatment she must have faced as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

Her professional path moved toward self-sufficiency. After time in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling in Portland in 1991, and later going to a more remote location, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams saw early on the immense possibilities of the internet