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

Flipping through the jazz records at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, producer Kye Potter found a well-used recording by musician Jessica Williams. It looked like the classic independent effort. "The labels had come off the tape," he recalls. "It was copied at home, with printed inserts, a touch of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector particularly interested in the avant-garde movement following John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed unusual from Williams, who was primarily recognized for creating sparkling jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the West Coast scene knew her as a sonic explorer – at her live shows, she required pianos without the cover to allow her to reach inside and play the strings directly – it was a aspect that seldom found its way on her releases.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to see if additional recordings were available. She sent back four recordings of modified piano from the mid 1980s – two live, two studio creations. Although she had ceased playing publicly some time before, she also included some recent work. "She sent me around 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – complete albums," Potter recounts.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams during the Covid pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was issued in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. She was 73. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter says. Williams had been vocal concerning her difficulties following spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "However, I believe her personality, strength, self-confidence and the serenity she found through meditative practices all were evident 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 seeking to break free of convention. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano resonances, reveals that that impulse extended back decades. Rather than a consistent piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, far-off chimes, beasts in pens, and little machines sparking to life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with massive roars collapsing into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Guitarist Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the intensity of her music, but had scant knowledge of her dreamlike prepared piano until this release. Not long after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Technical Precursors

Her altered piano techniques have technical precursors: reflect on John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the groundbreaking approaches of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how successfully she blends these innovative timbres with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The language scarcely deviates from that which she honed in a discography extending to more than 80 albums, meaning the new psychedelically coloured sounds are fueled by the bubbling vitality of an performer in full control. This is thrilling stuff.

A Constant Innovator

Williams had always tinkered with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she reportedly said. She received her first upright piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she shared the anecdote of her first "dismantling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she commented: Williams removed a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor next to her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she explained.

Initially, Williams trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for improvising a section. But he saw her potential: a week later, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Brubeck would later refer to 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, displays her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her long journeys 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.

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 emerged as a strident, public critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "old boys' network," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of securing work – and of a profit-driven sector riding on the coattails of struggling artists.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she penned in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was eclectic, direct, openly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed 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 inhumane bullshit she must have faced as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

The artist's trajectory arced towards self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she lived in smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, moving to Portland in 1991, and later moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams saw early on the huge potential of the internet