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

While browsing the jazz records at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, artist Kye Potter found a worn cassette by American pianist Jessica Williams. It looked like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he recalls. "It was copied at home, with photocopied notes, a dab of fluorescent marker to highlight the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector particularly interested in the avant-garde movement following John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt out of character for Williams, who was primarily recognized for creating lively jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the West Coast scene knew her as a sonic explorer – at her live shows, she requested pianos with the top removed to allow her to get inside and play the strings directly – it was a aspect that infrequently appeared on her albums.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to inquire if additional recordings existed. She provided four recordings of modified piano from the 1980s – two performance tapes, two recorded in a studio. And though she had long since retired years earlier, she also enclosed some newer material. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – full releases," says Potter.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams throughout the pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces 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 states. Williams had been public about her difficulties following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "However, I believe her personality, strength, self-confidence and the calmness she found through her spiritual pursuits all were evident 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 musician trying to transcend convention. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano resonances, shows that that desire stretched back decades. In place of a consistent piano sound, the piano creates numerous distinct sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, far-off chimes, creatures in enclosures, and small devices sparking to life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with colossal bellows collapsing into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the power of her music, but was largely unaware of her surreal-sounding prepared piano until this release. Not long after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "surrealism in the improvisational vocals 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."

Historical Influences

Her altered piano techniques have historical forerunners: think of John Cage’s modified instruments, or the radical techniques of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how masterfully she blends these innovative timbres with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The stylistic approach rarely departs from that which she honed in a body of work spanning more than 80 albums, meaning the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are fueled by the fizzy energy of an performer in complete command. This is exhilarating material.

A Constant Innovator

Williams consistently explored the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she reportedly said. She obtained her first home piano in 1954. In her writings, she recounted the tale of her first "disassembling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she wrote: Williams took off a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor beside her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she explained.

Williams originally trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters 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. However, he detected her potential: the following week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Subsequently, Brubeck refer to Williams "a top-tier pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was just as awed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, exhibits her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her dedicated efforts to learn about 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 disenchanted with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of getting gigs – and of a corporate industry riding on the coattails of financially strained musicians.

"I am continually disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she wrote in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was eclectic, unflinching, 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 drove her from her preferred musical arena for a period, imagine what kind of inhumane bullshit she must have faced as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

Williams’ career moved toward self-sufficiency. After time in the bustling Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling in Portland in 1991, and later relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the huge potential of the internet