'An Unprecedented Discovery': Those Prepared Piano Revelations of Pianist Jessica Williams

While browsing the jazz section at a local record store a few years ago, artist Kye Potter came across a battered tape by American pianist Jessica Williams. It looked like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he says. "It was personally duplicated, with photocopied notes, a touch of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector particularly interested in the avant-garde movement after John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared unusual from Williams, who was primarily recognized for creating sparkling jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the California jazz community knew her as a musical experimenter – during her performances, she required pianos with the top removed to facilitate to get inside and strum the strings – it was a dimension that rarely made it on her releases.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to see if further recordings were available. She responded with four recordings of altered piano from the mid 1980s – two live, two made in the studio. Even though she had stepped away from public performance some time before, she also included some newer material. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synth tapes – full releases," says Potter.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams in the pandemic era to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was released in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, part way through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter says. Williams had been vocal concerning her struggles after spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "However, I believe her character, fortitude, assurance and the peace she found through having a spiritual practice all shone through in conversation."

In her subsequent 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 attempting to escape convention. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano resonances, reveals that that desire extended back decades. Instead of a uniform piano sound, the piano creates numerous distinct sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, distant church bells, creatures in enclosures, and little machines sparking to life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with colossal bellows giving way to snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Guitarist Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Vocalist 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 power of her music, but was largely unaware of her dreamlike prepared piano before this release. Shortly after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Today, that appears completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Historical Influences

These modified tones have historical forerunners: think of John Cage’s modified instruments, or the groundbreaking approaches of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how effectively she fuses these novel textures with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The stylistic approach hardly ever strays from that which she honed in a catalog stretching to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are powered by the effervescent force of an improviser in complete command. This is electrifying music.

A Constant Innovator

Williams had always tinkered with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she once explained. She was given her first upright piano in 1954. In her writings, she told the story of her first "dismantling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she noted: Williams detached a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor next to her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she explained.

Williams originally learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences 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 introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

In time, Brubeck call Williams "one of the greatest 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 immersion in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Yet, 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 disillusioned with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a strident, public critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of landing performances – and of a profit-driven sector benefiting from the efforts of struggling artists.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she wrote in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, honest, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a transgender woman. A commentator observed: "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 suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

The artist's trajectory evolved into self-sufficiency. Following a period in the vibrant 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 great promise of the internet