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

Perusing the jazz section at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, collector Kye Potter discovered a battered tape by musician Jessica Williams. It seemed like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had come off the tape," he notes. "It was home-dubbed, with photocopied notes, a little bit of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector keenly focused on the avant-garde movement following John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt out of character for Williams, who was best known for creating vibrant jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a creative innovator – during her performances, she required pianos lacking the lid to make it easier to access the interior and strum the strings – it was a aspect that infrequently appeared on her albums.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to see if further recordings existed. She provided four recordings of modified piano from the 1980s – two performance tapes, two studio creations. Even though she had long since retired years earlier, she also included some contemporary pieces. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – full releases," Potter recounts.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams throughout the pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was released in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, midway through the project. She was 73. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter reveals. Williams had been open regarding her difficulties following spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "But I think her personality, strength, self-confidence and the calmness she found through her spiritual pursuits all shone through 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 musician seeking to escape tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano echoes, reveals that that desire reached back decades. In place of a uniform piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, far-off chimes, creatures in enclosures, and little machines spluttering into life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with colossal bellows collapsing into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Listener Praise

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the intensity of her music, but had scant knowledge of her otherworldly prepared piano before this release. Soon after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Historical Influences

These modified tones have technical precursors: reflect on John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the groundbreaking approaches of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how successfully she blends these novel textures with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The language rarely departs from that which she cultivated in a discography spanning more than 80 albums, meaning the new trippily tinted sounds are driven by the bubbling vitality of an artist in complete command. This is exhilarating material.

A Constant Innovator

Williams consistently experimented with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she noted in an interview. She was given her first upright piano in 1954. On her blog, she recounted the tale of her first "dismantling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she noted: Williams detached a panel from beneath 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 studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the standard canon 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 introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

Brubeck would later refer to Williams "among the finest 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. However, despite her dedicated efforts to study the genre – first, to the hipper sounds of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before moving backwards to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she rapidly felt disappointed with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of securing work – and of a profit-driven sector benefiting from the efforts of financially strained musicians.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she penned in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, direct, expressly 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 chosen artistic field 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 evolved into self-sufficiency. Following a period in the bustling 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 recognized early the great promise of the internet