'An Unprecedented Discovery': The Prepared Piano Revelations of Jazz Star Jessica Williams

Perusing the jazz section at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, artist Kye Potter found a well-used recording by American pianist Jessica Williams. It seemed like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he recalls. "It was copied at home, with photocopied notes, a touch of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector deeply fascinated by the U.S. experimental scene after John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt out of character for Williams, who was most famous for producing lively jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the California jazz community knew her as a musical experimenter – for her concerts, she required pianos with the top removed to facilitate to access the interior and play the strings directly – it was a facet that rarely made it on her releases.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to ask if any more recordings had been made. She provided four recordings of modified piano from the mid 1980s – two concert recordings, two recorded in a studio. Even though she had stepped away from public performance years earlier, she also included some contemporary pieces. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – complete albums," Potter recounts.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams throughout the pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was released in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. She was 73. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter states. Williams had been public about her hardships following 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 serenity she found through having a spiritual practice all were evident in conversation."

In later 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 pianist seeking to escape convention. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano resonances, reveals that that impulse reached back decades. Rather than a homogenous piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic associations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, far-off chimes, animals rattling around cages, and little machines coughing to start. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with monumental roars dissolving into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Musician Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" 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 was largely unaware of her surreal-sounding prepared piano prior to 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. "Now that seems completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Artistic Forebears

Williams’ prepared sounds have technical precursors: consider John Cage’s modified instruments, or the groundbreaking approaches of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how successfully she blends these innovative timbres with her own soulful language at the keyboard. Her musical speech hardly ever strays from that which she cultivated in a catalog stretching to more than 80 albums, so that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are fueled by the bubbling vitality of an performer in complete command. That's electrifying music.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams consistently explored the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she reportedly said. She received her first upright piano in 1954. In her writings, she recounted the tale 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 placed it on the floor next to her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she explained.

Early on, Williams 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 scolded her for embellishing a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the next week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

Brubeck would later describe Williams "among the finest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was just as awed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, exhibits her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Yet, despite her long journeys to study the genre – first, to the hipper sounds of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before moving backwards to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she quickly became disenchanted with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met 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 poor compensation, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of landing performances – and of a corporate industry riding on the coattails of struggling artists.

"I am continually disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she stated in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, direct, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans woman. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her chosen artistic field for a period, imagine what kind of cruel nonsense she must have faced as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

The artist's trajectory moved toward self-sufficiency. Following a period in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she lived in smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, moving to Portland in 1991, and later relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams understood from the beginning the huge potential of the internet