'An Unprecedented Discovery': Those Altered Instrument Revelations of Pianist Jessica Williams

Flipping through the jazz aisle at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, artist Kye Potter found a battered tape by American pianist Jessica Williams. It seemed like the classic independent effort. "The labels had detached from the tape," he notes. "It was copied at home, with xeroxed liners, a little bit of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector particularly interested in the avant-garde movement after John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt 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 west coast jazz circuit knew her as a sonic explorer – during her performances, she required pianos with the top removed to facilitate to access the interior and strum the strings – it was a facet that infrequently appeared on her albums.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to see if further recordings were available. She sent back four recordings of altered piano from the mid 1980s – two concert recordings, two recorded in a studio. Although she had stepped away from public performance years earlier, she also included some contemporary pieces. "She sent me around 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – full releases," Potter recounts.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams in the pandemic era to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was released in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, during the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter reveals. Williams had been public about her hardships after spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "But I think her personality, strength, self-confidence and the peace she found through her spiritual pursuits all came out in conversation."

In later 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 pianist seeking to break free of convention. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano echoes, shows that that desire extended back decades. Instead of a uniform piano sound, the piano creates numerous distinct sonic evocations: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, remote carillons, creatures in enclosures, and small devices coughing to start. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with monumental roars dissolving into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Musician Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the force of her music, but had scant knowledge of her surreal-sounding prepared piano before this release. Shortly after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Historical Influences

These modified tones have artistic antecedents: reflect on John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the groundbreaking approaches of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how successfully she merges these innovative timbres with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The language rarely departs from that which she honed in a body of work extending to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are fueled by the effervescent force of an improviser in full control. That's electrifying music.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams had always explored the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she noted in an interview. She obtained her first home piano in 1954. In her writings, she shared the anecdote of her first "taking apart" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she wrote: Williams took off a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor alongside her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she stated.

Initially, Williams studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for altering a section. However, he detected her potential: a week later, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

In time, Brubeck refer to 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 absorption in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Yet, despite her long journeys to study the genre – first, to the more modern styles of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before working her way back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she rapidly felt disappointed with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "boys’ club," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of landing performances – and of a corporate industry riding on the coattails of struggling artists.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to organise, communicate and stand up 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 eclectic, unflinching, openly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans individual. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her preferred musical arena 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."

Forging an Autonomous Career

Her professional path 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 moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams understood from the beginning the huge potential of the internet