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

Perusing the jazz aisle at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, producer Kye Potter came across a battered tape by American pianist Jessica Williams. It seemed like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had detached from the tape," he says. "It was personally duplicated, with photocopied notes, a little bit of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

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

If the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a creative innovator – for her concerts, she asked for pianos without the cover to make it easier to reach inside and pluck the strings – it was a facet that infrequently appeared on her records.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to inquire if further recordings had been made. She provided four recordings of prepared piano from the 1980s – two concert recordings, two studio creations. Although she had ceased playing publicly some time before, she also included some newer material. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – full releases," says Potter.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams throughout the pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was published in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, during the project. She was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter reveals. Williams had been open regarding her struggles following spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "But I think her personality, strength, self-confidence and the serenity she found through her spiritual pursuits all were evident in conversation."

In her subsequent 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 artist trying to break free of expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano resonances, demonstrates that that drive stretched back decades. In place of a uniform piano sound, the piano creates a multitude of sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, distant church bells, beasts in pens, and tiny engines spluttering into life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with monumental roars collapsing into biting, staccato riffs.

Listener Praise

Musician Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the intensity of her music, but had scant knowledge of her dreamlike prepared piano until this release. Soon after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Now that seems completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Artistic Forebears

Williams’ prepared sounds have technical precursors: think of John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the radical techniques of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how effectively she fuses these new sounds with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The stylistic approach rarely departs from that which she honed in a catalog extending to more than 80 albums, so that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are powered by the bubbling vitality of an improviser in total mastery. It’s electrifying music.

A Constant Innovator

Williams consistently tinkered with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she noted in an interview. She was given her first home piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she shared the anecdote of her first "disassembling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she wrote: Williams detached a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor beside her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she stated.

Early on, Williams studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for improvising a section. But he saw her potential: the next week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Subsequently, Brubeck describe Williams "a top-tier pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was similarly impressed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, displays her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. However, despite her extensive studies to learn about the genre – first, to the hipper sounds of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before tracing a path back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she soon grew disappointed with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a forceful, open 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 getting gigs – and of a profit-driven sector riding on the coattails of financially strained musicians.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she wrote in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was eclectic, unflinching, expressly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans individual. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her chosen artistic field for a period, imagine what kind of inhumane bullshit she must have suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

Williams’ career arced towards self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she relocated to smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling in 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