'It Was Utterly Unique': Those Altered Instrument Revelations of Pianist Jessica Williams

Flipping through the jazz records at a local record store a few years ago, artist Kye Potter discovered a battered tape by musician Jessica Williams. It seemed like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he recalls. "It was home-dubbed, with photocopied notes, a touch of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector deeply fascinated by the American musical avant garde post John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed atypical for Williams, who was primarily recognized for producing vibrant jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a creative innovator – during her performances, she asked for pianos lacking the lid to allow her to reach inside and play the strings directly – it was a aspect that infrequently appeared on her albums.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to ask if further recordings existed. She sent back four recordings of altered piano from the 1980s – two concert recordings, two studio creations. Even though she had long since retired some time before, she also included some newer material. "She sent me around 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – full releases," Potter recounts.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams throughout the pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was published in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter reveals. Williams had been open regarding her hardships following spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "Yet I feel her personality, strength, self-confidence and the serenity she found through her spiritual pursuits all came out in conversation."

In her subsequent electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – defiantly tagged "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a pianist attempting to escape convention. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano resonances, demonstrates that that desire stretched back decades. Instead of a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates numerous distinct sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, remote carillons, creatures in enclosures, and small devices coughing to start. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with massive roars dissolving into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the power of her music, but knew little of her otherworldly prepared piano before this release. Shortly after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Technical Precursors

These modified tones have technical precursors: reflect on John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the radical techniques of American eccentric Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how masterfully she fuses these innovative timbres with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. Her musical speech rarely departs from that which she cultivated in a catalog spanning more than 80 albums, meaning the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are powered by the bubbling vitality of an improviser in complete command. It’s thrilling stuff.

A Constant Innovator

Williams consistently experimented with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she reportedly said. She obtained her first home piano in 1954. In her writings, she told the story of her first "disassembling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she commented: Williams took off a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor beside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she explained.

Initially, Williams learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she took 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 introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

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, shows her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. However, despite her long journeys to study the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before moving backwards to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she soon grew disenchanted with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "old boys' network," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of securing work – and of a profit-driven sector benefiting from the efforts of artists in need.

"I am continually disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she wrote in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, direct, 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 desired musical domain 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."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

The artist's trajectory moved toward self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she relocated to 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 understood from the beginning the immense possibilities of the internet