'An Unprecedented Discovery': Those Prepared Piano Revelations of Jazz Star Jessica Williams

While browsing the jazz records at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, collector Kye Potter discovered a worn cassette by American pianist Jessica Williams. It seemed like the classic independent effort. "The labels had detached from the tape," he recalls. "It was copied at home, with photocopied notes, a touch of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector particularly interested in the avant-garde movement after John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt unusual from Williams, who was best known for making vibrant 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 without the cover to make it easier to reach inside and strum the strings – it was a dimension that infrequently appeared on her releases.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to see if any more recordings were available. She responded with four recordings of altered piano from the mid 1980s – two concert recordings, two studio creations. Even though she had ceased playing publicly some time before, she also enclosed some newer material. "She sent me around 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – complete albums," Potter explains.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams during the Covid pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was published in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter reveals. Williams had been open regarding her hardships after spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "But I think her personality, strength, self-confidence and the serenity she found through having a spiritual practice all shone through in conversation."

In her subsequent 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 musician seeking to transcend expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano resonances, shows that that drive extended back decades. Rather than a consistent piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic evocations: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, far-off chimes, animals rattling around cages, and little machines spluttering into life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with monumental roars dissolving into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Listener Praise

Guitarist 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 attracted to the intensity of her music, but knew little of her surreal-sounding prepared piano before 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 understood by me then."

Artistic Forebears

These modified tones have technical precursors: reflect on John Cage’s modified instruments, or the innovative methods of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how successfully she fuses these innovative timbres with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The language rarely departs from that which she cultivated in a body of work extending to more than 80 albums, so that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are fueled by the fizzy energy of an improviser in total mastery. That's exhilarating material.

A Constant Innovator

Williams consistently tinkered with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she noted in an interview. She obtained her first home piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she shared the anecdote of her first "disassembling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she wrote: Williams took off a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor beside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she wrote.

Williams originally learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for improvising a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the next week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

Subsequently, Brubeck refer to Williams "among the finest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was similarly impressed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, shows her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Yet, despite her long journeys to learn about the genre – first, to the more modern styles of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before working her way back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she quickly became disappointed with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of getting gigs – and of a profit-driven sector profiting from the work of struggling artists.

"I am continually disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of core values," she penned in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, honest, expressly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a transgender woman. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her chosen artistic field 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."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Williams’ career arced towards self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the bustling Bay Area scene, she lived in smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling in Portland in 1991, and later moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the great promise of the internet