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

While browsing the jazz aisle at a local record store 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 says. "It was copied at home, with xeroxed liners, a dab of fluorescent marker to highlight the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector keenly focused on the avant-garde movement after John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared out of character for Williams, who was best known for creating vibrant jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the West Coast scene knew her as a musical experimenter – at her live shows, she requested pianos with the top removed to allow her to get inside and strum the strings – it was a aspect that infrequently appeared on her releases.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to ask if further recordings existed. She responded with four recordings of prepared piano from the 1980s – two live, two studio creations. And though she had long since retired previously, she also shared some recent work. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – full releases," says Potter.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams in the pandemic era to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was published in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, midway through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter states. Williams had been public about her difficulties 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 meditative practices all were evident in conversation."

In her subsequent 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 seeking to break free of convention. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano resonances, shows that that impulse stretched 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, beasts in pens, and tiny engines spluttering into life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with massive roars collapsing into biting, staccato riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Musician Jeff Parker states 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 being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the intensity of her music, but had scant knowledge of her dreamlike prepared piano prior to this release. Soon after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Now that seems completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Technical Precursors

These modified tones have historical forerunners: reflect on John Cage’s modified instruments, or the radical techniques of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how effectively she merges these new sounds with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The language rarely departs from that which she developed in a body of work stretching to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are driven by the effervescent force of an artist in complete command. This is thrilling stuff.

A Constant Innovator

Williams consistently experimented with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she reportedly said. She obtained her first upright piano in 1954. In her writings, she shared the anecdote of her first "disassembling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she noted: Williams removed a panel from below 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 wrote.

Initially, Williams trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for embellishing a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the next week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Subsequently, Brubeck call Williams "one of the greatest 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 absorption in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. However, despite her long journeys to study the genre – first, to the hipper sounds of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before tracing a path back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she quickly became disappointed with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged 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 "boys’ club," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of securing work – and of a profit-driven sector benefiting from the efforts of artists in need.

"I am continually disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of core values," she wrote in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, direct, openly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans individual. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her preferred musical arena for a period, imagine what kind of terrible treatment she must have suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Her professional path evolved into self-sufficiency. After time in the bustling Bay Area scene, she lived in smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling in Portland in 1991, and later going to a more remote location, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams understood from the beginning the great promise of the internet