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

While browsing the jazz records at a local record store a few years ago, collector 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 notes. "It was home-dubbed, with photocopied notes, a little bit of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector particularly interested in the U.S. experimental scene following John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt out of character for Williams, who was primarily recognized for producing lively jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a creative innovator – for her concerts, she requested pianos with the top removed to make it easier to get inside and strum the strings – it was a facet that infrequently appeared on her records.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to see if additional recordings had been made. She sent back four recordings of modified piano from the 1980s – two performance tapes, two recorded in a studio. Even though she had stepped away from public performance some time before, she also included some recent work. "She sent me around 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – complete albums," says Potter.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams in the pandemic era to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was issued in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, during the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter reveals. Williams had been open regarding her hardships following spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "But I think her character, fortitude, assurance and the serenity she found through her spiritual pursuits all shone through in conversation."

In later 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 pianist seeking to break free of expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano echoes, reveals that that desire reached back decades. Rather than a consistent piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic impressions: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, creatures in enclosures, and little machines sparking to life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with monumental roars giving way to snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Musician Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the intensity of her music, but was largely unaware of her surreal-sounding prepared piano until 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 recalls. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Artistic Forebears

These modified tones have technical precursors: think of John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the radical techniques of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how masterfully she blends these innovative timbres with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The language hardly ever strays from that which she developed in a body of work extending to more than 80 albums, so that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are driven by the fizzy energy of an performer in total mastery. It’s thrilling stuff.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams consistently tinkered with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she reportedly said. She was given her first home piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she recounted the tale of her first "disassembling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she noted: Williams detached a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor next to her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she stated.

Initially, Williams studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for embellishing a section. However, he detected her potential: the next week, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Brubeck would later refer to 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 absorption in jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. Yet, despite her dedicated efforts to study 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 soon grew disillusioned 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 became a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of securing work – and of a corporate industry riding on the coattails of financially strained musicians.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she penned in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was eclectic, 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 chased her from her preferred musical arena 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 arced towards self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she lived in smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, moving to 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