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

Perusing the jazz records at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, producer Kye Potter discovered a worn cassette by American pianist Jessica Williams. It looked like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had come off the tape," he notes. "It was home-dubbed, with printed inserts, a dab of fluorescent marker to accentuate the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector deeply fascinated by the American musical avant garde after John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt atypical for Williams, who was best known for creating lively jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the West Coast scene knew her as a sonic explorer – during her performances, she asked for pianos with the top removed to facilitate to get inside and play the strings directly – it was a facet that infrequently appeared on her releases.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to inquire if additional recordings were available. She sent back four recordings of prepared piano from the mid 1980s – two concert recordings, two made in the studio. And though she had long since retired some time before, she also included some contemporary pieces. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synth tapes – full releases," Potter explains.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams in the pandemic era to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was released in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, during the project. She was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter states. Williams had been vocal concerning her difficulties following spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "However, I believe her character, fortitude, assurance and the peace she found through her spiritual pursuits all came out in conversation."

Within her more recent 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 artist seeking to escape tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano echoes, shows that that desire stretched back decades. Rather than a homogenous piano sound, the piano creates a multitude of sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, creatures in enclosures, and small devices sparking to life. It possesses a incredibly pressing 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. Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the intensity of her music, but was largely unaware of her dreamlike prepared piano until this release. Shortly after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing 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."

Artistic Forebears

These modified tones have technical precursors: reflect on John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the radical techniques of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how successfully she merges these new sounds with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. Her musical speech hardly ever strays from that which she cultivated in a catalog extending to more than 80 albums, meaning the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are driven by the bubbling vitality of an performer in complete command. That's exhilarating material.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams had always tinkered with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she noted in an interview. She was given her first vertical piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she recounted the tale of her first "taking apart" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she noted: Williams took off a panel from under 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.

Initially, Williams trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for embellishing a section. But he saw her potential: a week later, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Brubeck would later describe Williams "a top-tier pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was similarly impressed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, exhibits her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her dedicated efforts to educate herself the genre – first, to the hipper sounds of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before working her way back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she soon grew disillusioned with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "old boys' network," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of getting gigs – and of a corporate industry benefiting from the efforts of artists in need.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of core values," she stated in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, unflinching, openly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans individual. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her chosen artistic field for a period, imagine what kind of inhumane bullshit she must have suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

Forging an Autonomous Career

Her professional path moved toward self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the vibrant 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 recognized early the huge potential of the internet