'It Was Utterly Unique': The Prepared Piano Revelations of Pianist Jessica Williams

Perusing the jazz aisle at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, artist Kye Potter found a worn cassette by American pianist Jessica Williams. It looked like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had come off the tape," he says. "It was copied at home, with xeroxed liners, a dab of fluorescent marker to highlight the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector particularly interested in the avant-garde movement following John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed out of character for Williams, who was primarily recognized for making lively jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the California jazz community knew her as a musical experimenter – during her performances, she requested pianos with the top removed to make it easier to access the interior and play the strings directly – it was a dimension that infrequently appeared on her records.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to ask if additional recordings had been made. She sent back four recordings of modified piano from the mid-80s – two performance tapes, two made in the studio. Although she had stepped away from public performance years earlier, she also enclosed some recent work. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – complete albums," says Potter.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams in the pandemic era to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was released in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, midway through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter says. Williams had been vocal concerning her struggles after spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer discovery 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 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 pianist seeking to escape convention. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano resonances, demonstrates that that impulse reached back decades. Instead of a uniform piano sound, the piano creates numerous distinct sonic associations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, distant church bells, creatures in enclosures, and small devices spluttering into life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with colossal bellows dissolving into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Musician Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the force of her music, but knew little of her surreal-sounding prepared piano until this release. Not long after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Now that seems completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Technical Precursors

These modified tones have technical precursors: think of John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the radical techniques of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how masterfully she fuses these novel textures with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. Her musical speech rarely departs from that which she honed in a discography stretching to more than 80 albums, so that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are powered by the fizzy energy of an performer in full control. That's electrifying music.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Throughout her life, Williams tinkered with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she once explained. She received her first vertical piano in 1954. In her writings, she told the story of her first "disassembling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she noted: Williams took off a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor alongside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she explained.

Initially, Williams trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the standard canon 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: a week later, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Brubeck would later refer to 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 immersion in jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. Yet, despite her extensive studies to learn about the genre – first, to the more modern styles 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.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the veteran'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 "male-dominated sphere," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of landing performances – and of a corporate industry profiting from the work of struggling artists.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she stated in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was eclectic, unflinching, openly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans individual. As one critic noted: "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."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Williams’ career arced towards self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the bustling Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling in 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