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

Flipping through the jazz aisle at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, producer Kye Potter discovered a battered tape by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It seemed like the classic independent effort. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he recalls. "It was home-dubbed, with printed inserts, a dab of fluorescent marker to highlight the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector keenly focused on the avant-garde movement after John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared atypical for Williams, who was most famous for making lively jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a sonic explorer – during her performances, she requested pianos lacking the lid to allow her to access the interior and pluck the strings – it was a facet that seldom found its way on her records.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to inquire if further recordings existed. She provided four recordings of prepared piano from the mid 1980s – two performance tapes, two studio creations. Even though she had ceased playing publicly previously, she also included some newer material. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synth tapes – full releases," Potter explains.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams in the pandemic era to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was published in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, midway through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter reveals. 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. "However, I believe her personality, strength, self-confidence and the serenity she found through meditative practices all came out 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 pianist attempting to transcend expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano echoes, demonstrates that that impulse stretched back decades. Rather than a uniform piano sound, the piano creates a multitude of sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, remote carillons, beasts in pens, and little machines spluttering into life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with massive roars collapsing into biting, staccato riffs.

Listener Praise

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while attending school 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. Not long after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Now that seems completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Artistic Forebears

These modified tones have technical precursors: consider John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the groundbreaking approaches of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how masterfully she merges these innovative timbres with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. Her musical speech scarcely deviates from that which she developed in a catalog spanning more than 80 albums, so that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are powered by the fizzy energy of an improviser in full control. It’s electrifying music.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Throughout her life, Williams experimented with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she noted in an interview. She was given her first vertical piano in 1954. In her writings, she recounted the tale of her first "taking apart" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she noted: Williams took off a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor beside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she wrote.

Early on, Williams studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for improvising a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the following week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Brubeck would later describe 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 knowledge of jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her long journeys to educate herself the genre – first, to the more modern styles of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before moving backwards to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she soon grew disappointed with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "old boys' network," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of securing work – and of a commercial business riding on the coattails of artists in need.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to coordinate, express, and advocate 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 eclectic, unflinching, expressly 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 endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

The artist's trajectory moved toward self-sufficiency. After time in the bustling Bay Area scene, she relocated to smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, making a home in Portland in 1991, and later moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the great promise of the internet