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

Flipping through the jazz records at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, producer Kye Potter discovered a battered tape by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It looked like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he notes. "It was home-dubbed, with printed inserts, a touch of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector keenly focused on the American musical avant garde after John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared atypical for Williams, who was primarily recognized for making vibrant jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the West Coast scene knew her as a creative innovator – during her performances, she required pianos with the top removed to allow her to reach inside and strum the strings – it was a aspect that infrequently appeared on her albums.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to inquire if additional recordings had been made. She provided four recordings of prepared piano from the mid-80s – two live, two made in the studio. Although she had stepped away from public performance some time before, she also shared some contemporary pieces. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synth tapes – full releases," Potter recounts.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams throughout the pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was issued in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, during the project. She was 73. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter says. Williams had been vocal concerning her difficulties following spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "However, I believe her character, fortitude, assurance and the peace she found through her spiritual pursuits all were evident in conversation."

In later synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based 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 escape expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano echoes, reveals that that drive extended back decades. In place of a homogenous piano sound, the piano creates a multitude of sonic evocations: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, distant church bells, animals rattling around cages, and small devices spluttering into life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with massive roars dissolving into biting, staccato riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the force of her music, but knew little of her dreamlike prepared piano until this release. Not long after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Now that seems completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Technical Precursors

These modified tones have artistic antecedents: reflect on John Cage’s modified instruments, or the groundbreaking approaches of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how successfully she merges these novel textures with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The stylistic approach hardly ever strays from that which she honed in a discography spanning more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are fueled by the fizzy energy of an artist in total mastery. It’s exhilarating material.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams had always explored the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she once explained. She was given her first upright piano in 1954. On her blog, she recounted the tale of her first "dismantling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she commented: Williams took off a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor next to her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she stated.

Initially, Williams learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for improvising a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the following week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Brubeck would later 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, displays her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. However, despite her extensive studies to educate herself the genre – first, to the more modern styles of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before tracing a path back 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 met the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of securing work – and of a commercial business riding on the coattails of artists in need.

"I am continually disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of core values," she stated in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, unflinching, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans woman. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her preferred musical arena for a period, imagine what kind of terrible treatment she must have endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

Her professional path moved toward self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the bustling 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 saw early on the immense possibilities of the internet