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

While browsing the jazz aisle at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, producer Kye Potter came across a well-used recording by American pianist Jessica Williams. It appeared like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he notes. "It was personally duplicated, 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 after John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared out of character for Williams, who was primarily recognized for producing sparkling jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a sonic explorer – at her live shows, she requested pianos lacking the lid to make it easier to access the interior and strum the strings – it was a aspect that seldom found its way on her records.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to inquire if any more recordings existed. She responded with four recordings of modified piano from the 1980s – two concert recordings, two recorded in a studio. Although she had ceased playing publicly some time before, she also enclosed some recent work. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synth tapes – full releases," says Potter.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams during the Covid pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was published in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, during the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," 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. "But I think her character, fortitude, assurance and the serenity she found through meditative practices all came out 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 artist trying to transcend tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano echoes, reveals that that drive reached back decades. Instead of a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates numerous distinct sonic associations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, far-off chimes, beasts in pens, and little machines spluttering into life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with monumental roars collapsing into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Guitarist Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while studying 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. Shortly after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Today, that appears completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Historical Influences

Her altered piano techniques have artistic antecedents: think of John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the groundbreaking approaches of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how effectively she blends these novel textures with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The language rarely departs from that which she developed in a discography stretching to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are fueled by the bubbling vitality of an improviser in complete command. This is electrifying music.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams consistently experimented with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she noted in an interview. She obtained her first upright piano in 1954. In her writings, she shared the anecdote of her first "taking apart" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she commented: Williams took off a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor alongside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she stated.

Williams originally trained in 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 scolded her for improvising a section. However, he detected her potential: the next week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Subsequently, Brubeck 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, displays her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her dedicated efforts to study 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 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 senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into 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 key way of securing work – and of a commercial business benefiting from the efforts of artists in need.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of core values," she penned in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, unflinching, openly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans individual. A commentator observed: "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 faced as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

Williams’ career moved toward self-sufficiency. After time in the active Bay Area scene, she lived in smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, moving to Portland in 1991, and later moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the huge potential of the internet