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

While browsing the jazz aisle at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, producer Kye Potter discovered a well-used recording by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It looked like the classic independent effort. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he says. "It was copied at home, with printed inserts, a little bit of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector deeply fascinated by the avant-garde movement post John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared atypical for Williams, who was best known for creating lively jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a creative innovator – during her performances, she requested pianos without the cover to facilitate to get inside and play the strings directly – it was a aspect that infrequently appeared on her albums.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to inquire if any more recordings existed. She responded with four recordings of modified piano from the 1980s – two performance tapes, two recorded in a studio. And though she had ceased playing publicly previously, she also shared some newer material. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – entire projects," says Potter.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams in the pandemic era to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was released in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, part way through the project. She was 73. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter states. Williams had been open regarding her struggles after spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "Yet I feel her character, fortitude, assurance and the serenity she found through her spiritual pursuits all came out in conversation."

Within her more recent synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – defiantly tagged "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a musician seeking to transcend convention. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano reverberations, reveals that that impulse stretched back decades. Instead of a consistent piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, creatures in enclosures, and little machines coughing to start. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with monumental roars collapsing into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Musician Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the power of her music, but knew little of her otherworldly prepared piano prior to this release. Not long after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "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 historical forerunners: consider John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the radical techniques of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how masterfully she fuses these novel textures with her own soulful language at the keyboard. Her musical speech scarcely deviates from that which she cultivated in a discography spanning more than 80 albums, meaning the new trippily tinted sounds are powered by the effervescent force of an artist in full control. That's electrifying music.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams had always tinkered with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she reportedly said. She was given her first vertical piano in 1954. In her writings, she recounted the tale of her first "dismantling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she commented: Williams removed a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor beside her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she stated.

Initially, Williams trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for altering a section. But he saw her potential: the following week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

Brubeck would later call Williams "a top-tier 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. Nevertheless, despite her long journeys to educate herself 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 rapidly felt disenchanted with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "boys’ club," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of landing performances – and of a profit-driven sector profiting from the work 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 penned in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was eclectic, honest, openly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans woman. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her chosen artistic field 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

The artist's trajectory evolved into self-sufficiency. Following a period in the active Bay Area scene, she relocated to smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, making a home 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 immense possibilities of the internet