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

While browsing the jazz section at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, producer Kye Potter discovered a worn cassette by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It seemed like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had come off the tape," he recalls. "It was home-dubbed, with xeroxed liners, a dab of fluorescent marker to highlight the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector keenly focused on the avant-garde movement post John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed unusual from Williams, who was most famous for producing vibrant jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the California jazz community knew her as a creative innovator – for her concerts, she requested pianos lacking the lid to allow her to access the interior and play the strings directly – it was a facet that rarely made it on her albums.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to see if additional recordings were available. She responded with four recordings of altered piano from the mid 1980s – two concert recordings, two made in the studio. Even though she had long since retired previously, she also included some contemporary pieces. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – entire projects," Potter recounts.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams during the Covid pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was released in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, midway through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter states. Williams had been vocal concerning her struggles following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "Yet I feel her personality, strength, self-confidence and the peace she found through meditative practices all came out in conversation."

In her subsequent synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – explicitly categorized "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a artist attempting to transcend tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano echoes, demonstrates that that desire reached back decades. Rather than a uniform piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic associations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, remote carillons, creatures in enclosures, and tiny engines coughing to start. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with massive roars giving way to growling, sharply accented riffs.

Listener Praise

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the force of her music, but knew little of her dreamlike prepared piano prior to this release. Not long after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Technical Precursors

Her altered piano techniques have artistic antecedents: think of John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the innovative methods of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how masterfully she merges these new sounds with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The language hardly ever strays from that which she cultivated in a catalog spanning more than 80 albums, so that the new trippily tinted sounds are fueled by the bubbling vitality of an performer in full control. It’s exhilarating material.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams had always explored the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she once explained. She obtained her first home piano in 1954. On her blog, she told the story of her first "disassembling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she commented: Williams detached a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor alongside her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she stated.

Early on, Williams learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for embellishing a section. Yet he recognized her potential: a week later, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

Subsequently, Brubeck 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 immersion in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Yet, despite her extensive studies to learn about the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before working her way back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she rapidly felt disappointed with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a strident, public critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of getting gigs – and of a commercial business benefiting from the efforts of struggling artists.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she wrote in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, unflinching, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans woman. A writer pointed out: "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 endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

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, making a home in Portland in 1991, and later relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams saw early on the huge potential of the internet