‘I’ve never heard anything like it before’: Jazz star Jessica Williams’ prepared piano discoveries | music

FWhile browsing the jazz section during a visit to his local record store a few years ago, artist Kyi Potter stumbled upon a tattered tape by American pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It seemed like the perfect DIY version. “The stickers came off the tape,” he says. “It was dubbed at home, with photo notes, and a bit of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and released on their own label, Ear Art.”

As a collector and occasional producer particularly interested in the American musical avant-garde after John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape called Prepared Piano. However, it seemed unusual for Williams, who was known for composing sparkling jazz in the direct imitation of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner. If the West Coast jazz circuit knows her as a musical experimenter – at her concerts, She ordered the piano without a lid to make it easier to get inside and play the strings – an aspect that rarely made it into her recordings.

“I’ve never heard anything like it before,” Potter says of the tape. So he emailed Williams to see if there were more records. I sent four prepared piano recordings from the mid-1980s – two live, and two studio produced. Although she has long since retired from playing publicly, it also includes some of her recent works. “She sent me probably 15 or 16 composite tapes — complete versions,” Potter says.

Potter worked with Williams during the Covid pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces released on Pre-Echo Press by artist Matt Connors in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, partly during the project. She was 73 years old. “She was struggling physically and financially,” Potter says. Williams had gone public about the difficulties she faced following spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and her cancer diagnosis in 2017. “But I think her character, her strength, her self-confidence and the calm she found through doing a spiritual practice, all came up in the conversation.”

On later groove-focused electronic releases like Blood Music (2008) – defiantly marked “NOT JAZZ” on the Skeptical Music website – and Virtual Miles (2006 and 2007), you hear a pianist trying to break free from expectations. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly shifting piano echoes, reveals that this impulse spanned decades. Instead of a homogeneous piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic evocations: what could have been Cimbaloms, gamelan, distant church bells, animals wandering around the cages, small instruments roaring to life. It has a very urgent energy, with massive roars collapsing into snarling, extremely choppy notes.

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker told me he admired this “brilliant, diverse, exploratory and nuanced” record. Jessica Kinney, a vocalist and composer who has worked with Sara Davaci and Son O)), heard Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the intensity of her music, but knew little about the surreal-sounding prepared piano until this release. Shortly after seeing Williams live, she went to Indonesia in search of “the surrealism of the improvisational singing of Javanese gamelan,” she recalls. “Now that seems quite normal as a relationship with her. I wish that had been known to me at the time.”

The sounds prepared by Williams have technical precursors: think of the prepared pianos of John Cage, or the radical techniques of eccentric American Henry Cowell. What’s amazing is how well she integrates these new sounds with her own vocabulary on the keyboard. The language rarely deviates from that developed in a discography spanning more than 80 albums, meaning fresh, colorful sounds are powered by the mystical energy of an improviser in complete control. It’s exciting stuff.

Williams was always experimenting with playing the piano. “I hit the notes, I saw the colors,” she told NPR’s Terry Gross in 1997. She acquired her first upright piano in 1954. In Currents, her long-running blog (miraculously preserved in the Internet Archive), she told the story of her first “teardown” — “as I did for everyone “Pianos,” she noted. Williams removed a pad from beneath the piano keyboard and placed it on the floor next to her bench. “I needed a drummer,” she wrote, “and that left foot became the hi-hat foot.”

Williams originally studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninoff; She took his famous Overture in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for improvising a passage. But he saw her potential: The next week, Dave Brubeck brought her in to play. I learned his Take Five program within a week.

Brubeck later called Williams “one of the greatest pianists I have ever heard,” and McCoy Tyner was similarly impressed. Williams’s Grammy-nominated 2004 album, Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, showcases her deep understanding of jazz history, as well as her engaging piano wit. However, despite her long travels to educate herself in the genre – first, to the popular sounds of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before returning to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P. Johnson – she soon became disillusioned with the world of jazz.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams when the latter played for a week at Keystone Corner. Bolstered by the advice of an older pianist (“Don’t let anyone stop you”), she became a vocal and vocal critic of her scene: of meager wages, the “boys club” of jazz, “jazz”—specifically smoking and drinking as the primary means of getting gigs—and a corporate industry that relied on the tails of struggling artists.

“I am constantly disappointed by the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to organize, communicate and advocate for a musical group, Any group“Core values,” she wrote in the liner notes for her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog is wide-ranging, incisive, and distinctly political and feminist, though she rarely discusses her experiences as a trans woman. As John Corbett recently noted in the German magazine Jazz Podium: “To add to the sexism…that chased her from her favorite music scene for a while, imagine what kind of inhumane bullshit a trans woman must have endured in the jazz scene of the early 1980s.

Williams’ career trended toward self-sufficiency. After spending time in the bustling Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities like Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling in Portland in 1991, then making a smaller move to Yakima, Washington state in the 2000s. Williams saw early on the enormous potential of the Internet “to change human consciousness beyond anything seen during the Industrial Revolution,” she wrote, as well as to help establish herself as an independent artist. By the late 1990s, she used her website to blog, manage another record label (Red and Blue Recordings), ship records, and maintain a mailing list of dedicated fans, who attended concerts—often given in people’s homes.

Even after she sold her piano to pay for her spinal surgery and retreated from public performance, she continued making music: not jazz (“When I stopped enjoying playing jazz, I stopped doing it,” she wrote in 2018, but on synthesizers). “It makes me happy – as a hobby.” After her death, some in the online jazz community noted that her death had gone almost unnoticed. Now, there is a feeling that Williams’ revival may be just beginning. For starters, Potter and Conners are considering a more blues-focused piano project. “Music has flowed from Jessica her whole life,” says Potter. Even in death, the feeling is that it’s not over yet.