'It Was Utterly Unique': Those Altered Instrument Discoveries of Jazz Star Jessica Williams

While browsing the jazz records at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, producer Kye Potter came across a well-used recording by American pianist Jessica Williams. It appeared like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he recalls. "It was personally duplicated, with xeroxed liners, a little bit of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector deeply fascinated by the avant-garde movement after John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared atypical for Williams, who was best known for producing sparkling jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a sonic explorer – at her live shows, she requested pianos lacking the lid to make it easier to access the interior and play the strings directly – it was a dimension that infrequently appeared on her releases.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to inquire if any more recordings were available. She responded with four recordings of altered piano from the mid-80s – two performance tapes, two recorded in a studio. And though she had long since retired previously, she also shared some contemporary pieces. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synth tapes – complete albums," Potter explains.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams during the Covid 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. Her age was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter states. Williams had been public about 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 came out in conversation."

In her subsequent synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based 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 escape convention. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano resonances, reveals that that desire extended back decades. In place of a consistent piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic associations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, beasts in pens, and tiny engines sparking to life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with colossal bellows dissolving into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Musician Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the power of her music, but was largely unaware of her otherworldly prepared piano prior to this release. Not long after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Now that seems completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Artistic Forebears

Williams’ prepared sounds have technical precursors: consider John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the innovative methods of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how effectively she merges these new sounds with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. Her musical speech hardly ever strays from that which she honed in a body of work spanning more than 80 albums, so that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are fueled by the effervescent force of an artist in full control. This is exhilarating material.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Throughout her life, Williams experimented with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she noted in an interview. She obtained her first upright piano in 1954. On her blog, she recounted the tale of her first "taking apart" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she wrote: Williams took off a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor beside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she wrote.

Initially, Williams studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for embellishing a section. However, he detected her potential: a week later, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

Brubeck would later 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, exhibits her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. However, despite her long journeys 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 quickly became disenchanted with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the senior musician'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 "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of landing performances – and of a corporate industry profiting from the work of struggling artists.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of core values," she penned in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, unflinching, expressly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans woman. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her preferred musical arena 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

Williams’ career moved toward self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the bustling Bay Area scene, she lived in smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, moving to Portland in 1991, and later going to a more remote location, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the great promise of the internet