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

While browsing the jazz records at a local record store a few years ago, artist Kye Potter found a worn cassette by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It looked like the classic independent effort. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he says. "It was home-dubbed, with xeroxed liners, a little bit of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector deeply fascinated by the avant-garde movement after John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed out of character for Williams, who was primarily recognized for creating vibrant jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a musical experimenter – at her live shows, she required pianos with the top removed to facilitate to get inside and pluck the strings – it was a aspect that rarely made it on her releases.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to inquire if additional recordings had been made. She responded with four recordings of modified piano from the mid-80s – two performance tapes, two made in the studio. Although she had long since retired years earlier, she also shared some recent work. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synth tapes – entire projects," Potter recounts.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams throughout the pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was issued in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, during the project. She was seventy-three. "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 diagnosis in 2017. "Yet I feel her character, fortitude, assurance and the calmness she found through meditative practices all came out 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 pianist seeking to escape tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano echoes, reveals that that desire extended back decades. Rather than a uniform piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic associations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, distant church bells, beasts in pens, and small devices spluttering into life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with monumental roars collapsing into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the intensity of her music, but was largely unaware of her dreamlike prepared piano before this release. Not long after attending 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 familiar to me then."

Artistic Forebears

Williams’ prepared sounds have artistic antecedents: reflect on John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the groundbreaking approaches of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how masterfully she merges these innovative timbres with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The language scarcely deviates from that which she cultivated in a discography spanning more than 80 albums, meaning the new trippily tinted sounds are driven by the fizzy energy of an artist in total mastery. It’s electrifying music.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Throughout her life, Williams explored the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she once explained. She received her first upright piano in 1954. In her writings, she recounted the tale of her first "taking apart" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she commented: Williams took off a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor beside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she stated.

Initially, Williams trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for altering a section. But he saw her potential: the next week, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Subsequently, Brubeck call Williams "a top-tier pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was equally admiring. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, displays her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. However, despite her extensive studies to educate herself the genre – first, to the hipper sounds of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before tracing a path back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she soon grew disappointed with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a strident, public critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "boys’ club," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of landing performances – and of a corporate industry riding on the coattails of financially strained musicians.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the truth 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, unflinching, openly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a transgender woman. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her desired musical domain for a period, imagine what kind of cruel nonsense she must have suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

Forging an Autonomous Career

The artist's trajectory moved toward self-sufficiency. After time in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she moved through 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