'It Was Utterly Unique': The Prepared Piano Discoveries of Jazz Star Jessica Williams

Perusing the jazz records at a local record store a few years ago, collector Kye Potter discovered a well-used recording by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It seemed like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he recalls. "It was home-dubbed, with xeroxed liners, a little bit of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector keenly focused on the American musical avant garde following John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared atypical for Williams, who was most famous for producing sparkling jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a musical experimenter – for her concerts, she required pianos without the cover to facilitate to get inside and play the strings directly – it was a dimension that rarely made it on her albums.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to ask if any more recordings existed. She responded with four recordings of prepared piano from the mid-80s – two performance tapes, two studio creations. Even though she had ceased playing publicly previously, she also shared some recent work. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – full releases," Potter recounts.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams during the Covid pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was published in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, during the project. She was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter says. Williams had been vocal concerning her hardships following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "Yet I feel her personality, strength, self-confidence and the peace she found through her spiritual pursuits all were evident in conversation."

Within her more recent electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – defiantly tagged "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a artist seeking to escape expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano echoes, demonstrates that that desire stretched back decades. In place of a homogenous piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic associations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, far-off chimes, beasts in pens, and small devices sparking to life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with massive roars dissolving into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Listener Praise

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while studying 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. Soon after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Today, that appears completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Artistic Forebears

Williams’ prepared sounds have historical forerunners: consider John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the groundbreaking approaches of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how effectively she merges these new sounds with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. Her musical speech hardly ever strays from that which she developed in a discography spanning more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are driven by the bubbling vitality of an improviser in complete command. It’s electrifying music.

A Constant Innovator

Throughout her life, Williams tinkered with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she reportedly said. She obtained her first vertical piano in 1954. On her blog, she shared the anecdote of her first "taking apart" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she commented: Williams took off a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor alongside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she stated.

Early on, Williams studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for improvising a section. But he saw her potential: the next week, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

Subsequently, 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 knowledge of jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. However, despite her long journeys to learn about 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 rapidly felt disillusioned with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a strident, public critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "boys’ club," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of landing performances – and of a corporate industry profiting from the work of financially strained musicians.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she stated in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was eclectic, direct, expressly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a transgender woman. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her preferred musical arena for a period, imagine what kind of cruel nonsense she must have suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

Her professional path arced towards self-sufficiency. After time in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, making a home in Portland in 1991, and later relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams understood from the beginning the great promise of the internet