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

While browsing the jazz section at a local record store a few years ago, artist Kye Potter discovered a worn cassette by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It appeared like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had come off the tape," he says. "It was home-dubbed, with photocopied notes, a little bit of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector particularly interested in the U.S. experimental scene following John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt out of character for Williams, who was best known for creating sparkling jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the West Coast scene knew her as a creative innovator – for her concerts, she required pianos with the top removed to allow her to get inside and pluck the strings – it was a aspect that seldom found its way on her releases.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to see if further recordings had been made. She sent back four recordings of altered piano from the 1980s – two performance tapes, two studio creations. And though she had ceased playing publicly some time before, she also shared some recent work. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – entire projects," Potter explains.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams throughout the pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was published in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter states. Williams had been open regarding her hardships following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "However, I believe her character, fortitude, assurance and the serenity she found through having a spiritual practice all were evident in conversation."

Within her more recent 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 musician attempting to transcend expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano reverberations, demonstrates that that desire stretched back decades. Instead of a consistent piano sound, the piano creates numerous distinct sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, far-off chimes, beasts in pens, and tiny engines spluttering into life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with monumental roars collapsing into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Musician Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the power of her music, but was largely unaware of her otherworldly prepared piano prior to this release. Not long after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Now that seems completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Historical Influences

These modified tones have historical forerunners: think of John Cage’s modified instruments, or the radical techniques of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What’s striking 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 honed in a catalog extending to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are driven by the bubbling vitality of an improviser in complete command. It’s electrifying music.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams had always tinkered with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she noted in an interview. She obtained her first upright piano in 1954. In her writings, she shared the anecdote of her first "dismantling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she wrote: Williams took off a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor alongside her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she explained.

Williams originally 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 chastised her for altering a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the following week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

In time, Brubeck describe Williams "one of the greatest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was just as awed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, displays her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her long journeys to educate herself 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 soon grew disappointed with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "old boys' network," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of landing performances – and of a commercial business riding on the coattails of struggling artists.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she stated in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was eclectic, direct, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a transgender woman. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her chosen artistic field for a period, imagine what kind of terrible treatment she must have endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

The artist's trajectory arced towards self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the active Bay Area scene, she lived in smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, moving to Portland in 1991, and later going to a more remote location, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams saw early on the immense possibilities of the internet