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

Perusing the jazz section at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, collector Kye Potter found a well-used recording by musician Jessica Williams. It seemed like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he notes. "It was personally duplicated, with printed inserts, a little bit of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector particularly interested in the U.S. experimental scene post John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared atypical for 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 – during her performances, she asked for pianos lacking the lid to facilitate to reach inside and pluck the strings – it was a facet that rarely made it on her albums.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to see if further recordings had been made. She provided four recordings of altered piano from the mid 1980s – two performance tapes, two studio creations. Although she had ceased playing publicly previously, she also included some contemporary pieces. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – entire projects," says Potter.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams throughout the pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was released in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, during the project. She was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter reveals. Williams had been open regarding her difficulties following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "But I think her personality, strength, self-confidence and the peace she found through having a spiritual practice all were evident 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 attempting to transcend convention. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano echoes, demonstrates that that drive stretched back decades. In place of a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic impressions: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, remote carillons, creatures in enclosures, and little machines spluttering into life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with colossal bellows dissolving into biting, staccato riffs.

Listener Praise

Guitarist Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the power of her music, but knew little of her otherworldly prepared piano prior to this release. Soon after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Now that seems completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Technical Precursors

Williams’ prepared sounds have technical precursors: reflect on John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the groundbreaking approaches of American eccentric Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how effectively she fuses these new sounds with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The language hardly ever strays from that which she honed in a body of work extending to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are driven by the bubbling vitality of an improviser in full control. It’s electrifying music.

A Constant Innovator

Throughout her life, Williams tinkered with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she once explained. She received her first vertical piano in 1954. In her writings, she recounted the tale of her first "dismantling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she noted: Williams took off a panel from below 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 stated.

Williams originally trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for altering a section. But he saw her potential: the following week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned 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 just as awed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, shows her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. Yet, despite her dedicated efforts 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 rapidly felt disappointed with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "old boys' network," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of landing performances – and of a corporate industry riding on the coattails of struggling artists.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she stated in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was eclectic, honest, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a transgender woman. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her chosen artistic field for a period, imagine what kind of inhumane bullshit she must have endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Williams’ career arced towards self-sufficiency. Following a period in the active Bay Area scene, she relocated to smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, moving to Portland in 1991, and later going to a more remote location, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams understood from the beginning the huge potential of the internet