'I'd Never Heard Anything Like It': Those Altered Instrument Revelations of Pianist Jessica Williams

Flipping through the jazz section at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, artist Kye Potter came across a battered tape by musician Jessica Williams. It seemed like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he says. "It was copied at home, with xeroxed liners, a touch of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector deeply fascinated by the avant-garde movement after John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared atypical for Williams, who was primarily recognized for producing vibrant jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a creative innovator – at her live shows, she requested pianos lacking the lid to allow her to get inside and play the strings directly – it was a facet that infrequently appeared on her releases.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to inquire if additional recordings were available. She provided four recordings of altered piano from the 1980s – two concert recordings, two made in the studio. Even though she had ceased playing publicly years earlier, she also included some newer material. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synth tapes – full releases," Potter explains.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated 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, midway through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter reveals. Williams had been vocal concerning her hardships after spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "But I think her character, fortitude, assurance and the peace she found through meditative practices all came out in conversation."

In her subsequent 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 musician attempting to transcend tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano reverberations, reveals that that desire reached back decades. In place of a uniform piano sound, the instrument creates numerous distinct sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, far-off chimes, beasts in pens, and tiny engines coughing to start. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with massive roars dissolving into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Guitarist Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard 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 before this release. Shortly after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Today, that appears completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Technical Precursors

Her altered piano techniques have artistic antecedents: think of John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the groundbreaking approaches of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how masterfully she blends these innovative timbres with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The stylistic approach hardly ever strays from that which she cultivated in a discography spanning more than 80 albums, so that the new trippily tinted sounds are fueled by the effervescent force of an improviser in total mastery. This is exhilarating material.

A Constant Innovator

Williams had always explored the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she noted in an interview. She received her first vertical piano in 1954. In her writings, she told the story of her first "disassembling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she commented: Williams took off a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor next to her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she explained.

Initially, Williams studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for embellishing a section. Yet he recognized her potential: a week later, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

In time, Brubeck describe Williams "among the finest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was similarly impressed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, exhibits her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her trademark playful 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 soon grew disenchanted with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a strident, public critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "old boys' network," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of getting gigs – and of a profit-driven sector profiting from the work of financially strained musicians.

"I am continually disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she penned in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was eclectic, unflinching, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans individual. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her chosen artistic field 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

Her professional path arced towards self-sufficiency. After time in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she relocated to smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling 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