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

Flipping through the jazz section at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, collector Kye Potter found a well-used recording by American pianist Jessica Williams. It appeared like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he says. "It was copied at home, with printed inserts, a dab of fluorescent marker to emphasize the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector particularly interested in the American musical avant garde following John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed out of character for Williams, who was most famous for producing lively jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the California jazz community knew her as a sonic explorer – at her live shows, she required pianos lacking the lid to allow her to reach inside and strum the strings – it was a dimension that infrequently appeared on her releases.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to inquire if any more recordings had been made. She responded with four recordings of prepared piano from the mid-80s – two performance tapes, two recorded in a studio. And though she had ceased playing publicly years earlier, she also included some contemporary pieces. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – full releases," says Potter.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams throughout the pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was published in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, midway through the project. She was 73. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter says. Williams had been public about her struggles following spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "But I think her personality, strength, self-confidence and the calmness she found through meditative practices all were evident in conversation."

In later electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – boldly labeled "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a musician seeking to transcend tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano echoes, shows that that impulse reached back decades. Rather than a consistent piano sound, the piano creates a multitude of sonic evocations: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, creatures in enclosures, and tiny engines sparking to life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with monumental roars dissolving into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the power 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, in search of "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Today, that appears completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Historical Influences

Williams’ prepared sounds have artistic antecedents: reflect on John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the groundbreaking approaches of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how effectively she merges these innovative timbres with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The language rarely departs from that which she developed in a catalog extending to more than 80 albums, meaning the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are driven by the bubbling vitality of an improviser in full control. It’s exhilarating material.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams consistently tinkered with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she noted in an interview. She received her first vertical piano in 1954. On her blog, she told the story of her first "dismantling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she noted: Williams took off a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor next to 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. Youthful exposures with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she brought 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 brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Subsequently, Brubeck 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, shows her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Yet, despite her long journeys to educate herself the genre – first, to the hipper sounds 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.

Upon relocating 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 turned into a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "old boys' network," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of landing performances – and of a profit-driven sector benefiting from the efforts of struggling artists.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she penned in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was eclectic, honest, expressly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a transgender woman. A writer pointed out: "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 suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

Forging an Autonomous Career

The artist's trajectory evolved into self-sufficiency. After time 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 saw early on the immense possibilities of the internet