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

While browsing the jazz records at a local record store a few years ago, producer Kye Potter discovered a well-used recording by musician Jessica Williams. It appeared like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had detached from the tape," he notes. "It was home-dubbed, with xeroxed liners, a little bit of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector keenly focused on the American musical avant garde post John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed out of character for Williams, who was most famous for producing sparkling jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the California jazz community knew her as a musical experimenter – during her performances, she requested pianos lacking the lid to make it easier to reach inside and pluck the strings – it was a dimension that seldom found its way on her records.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to ask if additional recordings were available. She responded with four recordings of prepared piano from the mid 1980s – two concert recordings, two made in the studio. Even though she had ceased playing publicly some time before, she also shared some newer material. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – entire projects," Potter recounts.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams during the Covid pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was published in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. She was 73. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter reveals. Williams had been vocal concerning her hardships after spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "But I think her character, fortitude, assurance 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) – boldly labeled "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a artist seeking to escape expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano reverberations, shows that that impulse reached back decades. Instead of a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates numerous distinct sonic evocations: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, far-off chimes, animals rattling around cages, and tiny engines coughing to start. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with monumental roars collapsing into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Listener Praise

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Composer 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 force of her music, but was largely unaware of her surreal-sounding prepared piano until this release. Soon after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Technical Precursors

Her altered piano techniques have technical precursors: reflect on John Cage’s modified instruments, or the innovative methods of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how successfully she fuses these innovative timbres with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The language rarely departs from that which she developed in a body of work extending to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are driven by the fizzy energy of an performer in complete command. This is thrilling stuff.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams consistently tinkered with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she noted in an interview. She obtained her first vertical piano in 1954. In her writings, she told the story of her first "disassembling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she commented: Williams took off a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor beside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she explained.

Initially, Williams learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for improvising a section. However, he detected her potential: the following week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

In time, Brubeck refer to 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, exhibits her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. However, despite her extensive studies 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 disillusioned with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a strident, public critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of securing work – and of a profit-driven sector profiting from the work of artists in need.

"I am continually disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she penned in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, direct, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans woman. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her desired musical domain for a period, imagine what kind of terrible treatment she must have suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

The artist's trajectory evolved into self-sufficiency. After time in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she lived in smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling in Portland in 1991, and later relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the huge potential of the internet