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

Perusing the jazz aisle at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, producer Kye Potter came across a worn cassette by American pianist Jessica Williams. It looked like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had come off the tape," he notes. "It was personally duplicated, with xeroxed liners, a little bit of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector deeply fascinated by the U.S. experimental scene post John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed unusual from Williams, who was most famous for making lively jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the California jazz community knew her as a musical experimenter – for her concerts, she required pianos without the cover to allow her to get inside and play the strings directly – it was a facet that seldom found its way on her releases.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to see if further recordings had been made. She provided four recordings of prepared piano from the mid 1980s – two live, two studio creations. Although she had stepped away from public performance previously, she also enclosed some contemporary pieces. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – complete albums," says Potter.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams in the pandemic era to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was issued in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, during the project. She was 73. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter reveals. Williams had been vocal concerning her hardships following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from 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 were evident in conversation."

Within her more recent electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – explicitly categorized "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a artist trying to break free of convention. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano echoes, demonstrates that that desire extended back decades. Instead of a homogenous piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic evocations: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, remote carillons, beasts in pens, and tiny engines coughing to start. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with monumental roars collapsing into biting, staccato riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Musician 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))), experienced Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the power of her music, but had scant knowledge of her otherworldly prepared piano prior to this release. Not long after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Today, that appears completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Historical Influences

Her altered piano techniques have historical forerunners: reflect on John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the innovative methods of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how effectively she blends these innovative timbres with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The language rarely departs from that which she cultivated in a discography spanning more than 80 albums, meaning the new psychedelically coloured sounds are driven by the bubbling vitality of an performer in full control. It’s exhilarating material.

A Constant Innovator

Throughout her life, Williams experimented with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she noted in an interview. She received her first vertical piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she told the story of her first "taking apart" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she wrote: Williams detached a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor next to her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she explained.

Initially, Williams trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded 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.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Brubeck would later describe Williams "among the finest 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 characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. However, despite her dedicated efforts to learn about the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before working her way back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she quickly became disillusioned with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered 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 "boys’ club," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of landing performances – and of a profit-driven sector riding on the coattails of struggling artists.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of core values," she stated in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, honest, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a transgender 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

Williams’ career arced towards self-sufficiency. Following a period in the bustling Bay Area scene, she relocated to smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, making a home in Portland in 1991, and later moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams understood from the beginning the great promise of the internet