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

Flipping through the jazz records at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, artist Kye Potter discovered a worn cassette by American pianist Jessica Williams. It appeared like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had detached from the tape," he says. "It was copied at home, with printed inserts, a dab of fluorescent marker to emphasize the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector particularly interested in the avant-garde movement post John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared unusual from Williams, who was most famous for making vibrant jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the California jazz community knew her as a musical experimenter – at her live shows, she required pianos without the cover to make it easier to get inside and strum the strings – it was a dimension that rarely made it on her records.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to see if additional recordings existed. She responded with four recordings of modified piano from the 1980s – two live, two studio creations. Although she had ceased playing publicly years earlier, she also included some contemporary pieces. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synth tapes – full releases," says Potter.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams throughout the pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was released in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, part way through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter states. Williams had been public about her hardships after spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "However, I believe her character, fortitude, assurance and the calmness she found through having a spiritual practice all came out in conversation."

In later synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – boldly labeled "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a pianist seeking to escape tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano resonances, shows that that impulse extended back decades. In place of a consistent piano sound, the instrument creates numerous distinct sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, remote carillons, beasts in pens, and little machines spluttering into life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with massive roars collapsing into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Musician Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the force of her music, but was largely unaware of her dreamlike prepared piano prior to this release. Not long after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Now that seems completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Historical Influences

Her altered piano techniques have technical precursors: think of John Cage’s modified instruments, or the groundbreaking approaches of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how successfully she fuses these innovative timbres with her own soulful language at the keyboard. Her musical speech scarcely deviates from that which she developed in a catalog stretching to more than 80 albums, meaning the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are powered by the effervescent force of an performer in full control. This is electrifying music.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Throughout her life, Williams explored the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she noted in an interview. She received her first upright piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she told the story of her first "dismantling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she commented: Williams removed a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor beside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she wrote.

Early on, Williams learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for altering a section. However, he detected her potential: the next 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 "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, shows her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her long journeys to learn about 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.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "old boys' network," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of getting gigs – and of a corporate industry riding on the coattails of struggling artists.

"I am continually disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she wrote in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, direct, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans individual. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her desired musical domain for a period, imagine what kind of inhumane bullshit she must have faced as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Her professional path evolved into self-sufficiency. Following a period in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she lived in 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 saw early on the great promise of the internet