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

While browsing the jazz aisle at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, collector Kye Potter found a battered tape by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It looked like the classic independent effort. "The labels had detached from the tape," he says. "It was personally duplicated, with xeroxed liners, a touch of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector deeply fascinated by the U.S. experimental scene after John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt out of character for Williams, who was best known for making lively jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the California jazz community knew her as a sonic explorer – at her live shows, she requested pianos without the cover to make it easier to get inside and play the strings directly – it was a dimension that seldom found its way on her records.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to inquire if additional recordings had been made. She responded with four recordings of modified piano from the 1980s – two concert recordings, two recorded in a studio. Even though she had stepped away from public performance some time before, she also included some recent work. "She sent me around 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – entire projects," says Potter.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams throughout the pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was released in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, part way through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter reveals. Williams had been vocal concerning her difficulties after spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "However, I believe her personality, strength, self-confidence and the serenity she found through her spiritual pursuits all shone through in conversation."

Within her more recent 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 artist trying to escape expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano reverberations, demonstrates that that drive reached back decades. Rather than a consistent piano sound, the instrument creates a multitude of sonic associations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, far-off chimes, creatures in enclosures, and little machines coughing to start. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with colossal bellows giving way to snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the intensity of her music, but was largely unaware of her otherworldly prepared piano prior to this release. Shortly after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Today, that appears completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Historical Influences

Her altered piano techniques have technical precursors: reflect on John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the innovative methods of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how successfully she blends these novel textures with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. Her musical speech rarely departs from that which she cultivated in a catalog stretching to more than 80 albums, meaning the new psychedelically coloured sounds are driven by the fizzy energy of an performer in full control. That's electrifying music.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams had always tinkered with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she noted in an interview. She obtained her first upright piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she recounted the tale of her first "taking apart" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she noted: Williams removed 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 wrote.

Early on, Williams studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for embellishing a section. However, he detected her potential: a week later, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

In time, Brubeck call 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 knowledge of jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her extensive studies to learn about 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 soon grew disillusioned with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "boys’ club," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of getting gigs – and of a profit-driven sector benefiting from the efforts of artists in need.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she stated in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, honest, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans woman. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her preferred musical arena for a period, imagine what kind of inhumane bullshit she must have endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Her professional path evolved into self-sufficiency. After time 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 relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the immense possibilities of the internet