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

Flipping through the jazz aisle at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, collector Kye Potter came across a worn cassette by musician Jessica Williams. It appeared like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he says. "It was personally duplicated, with photocopied notes, a little bit of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector keenly focused on the avant-garde movement post John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed atypical for Williams, who was most famous for producing sparkling jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a musical experimenter – for her concerts, she required pianos without the cover to facilitate to reach inside and strum the strings – it was a aspect that seldom found its way on her albums.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to ask if additional recordings had been made. She sent back four recordings of modified piano from the 1980s – two concert recordings, two made in the studio. And though she had ceased playing publicly some time before, she also enclosed some newer material. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – complete albums," says Potter.

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 issued in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, midway through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter states. Williams had been public about her difficulties after spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "Yet I feel her personality, strength, self-confidence and the serenity she found through her spiritual pursuits all shone through in conversation."

Within her more recent 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 artist seeking to break free of expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano reverberations, reveals that that desire reached back decades. In place of a consistent piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, remote carillons, beasts in pens, and little machines spluttering into life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with monumental roars giving way to snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Listener Praise

Guitarist Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the force of her music, but had scant knowledge of her otherworldly prepared piano prior to this release. Soon after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Technical Precursors

Williams’ prepared sounds have historical forerunners: consider John Cage’s modified instruments, or the groundbreaking approaches of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how masterfully she merges these novel textures with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. Her musical speech scarcely deviates from that which she honed in a catalog spanning more than 80 albums, meaning the new trippily tinted sounds are powered by the fizzy energy of an artist in complete command. That's exhilarating material.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams consistently tinkered with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she reportedly said. She was given her first vertical piano in 1954. In her writings, she recounted the tale of her first "disassembling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she wrote: Williams took off a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor next to her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she wrote.

Initially, Williams trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for improvising a section. Yet he recognized her potential: a week later, 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 "among the finest 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 absorption in jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. However, despite her dedicated efforts to educate herself 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 quickly became disappointed with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a strident, public critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "boys’ club," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of securing work – and of a commercial business benefiting from the efforts of struggling artists.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the reality 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 album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, direct, decidedly ideological 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 endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Williams’ career moved toward self-sufficiency. Following a period in the bustling Bay Area scene, she relocated to smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, moving to Portland in 1991, and later relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams understood from the beginning the great promise of the internet