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

Perusing the jazz records at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, collector Kye Potter found a well-used recording by musician Jessica Williams. It seemed like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had come off the tape," he says. "It was copied at home, with xeroxed liners, a touch of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector particularly interested in the U.S. experimental scene after John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared unusual from Williams, who was primarily recognized for producing vibrant jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a creative innovator – for her concerts, she asked for pianos lacking the lid to make it easier to access the interior and pluck the strings – it was a facet that infrequently appeared on her albums.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to ask if any more recordings had been made. She sent back four recordings of altered piano from the mid-80s – two concert recordings, two made in the studio. Although she had stepped away from public performance previously, she also shared some newer material. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – full releases," Potter explains.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams throughout the pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was published in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter says. Williams had been vocal concerning her struggles after spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "Yet I feel her personality, strength, self-confidence and the peace she found through having a spiritual practice all shone through in conversation."

Within her more recent 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 seeking to escape expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano resonances, shows that that impulse stretched back decades. Rather than a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic associations: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, remote carillons, creatures in enclosures, and tiny engines coughing to start. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with massive roars dissolving into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Listener Praise

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the intensity of her music, but had scant knowledge of her surreal-sounding prepared piano prior to this release. Soon after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Historical Influences

Williams’ prepared sounds have technical precursors: reflect on John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the groundbreaking approaches of American eccentric Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how masterfully she fuses these innovative timbres with her own soulful language at the keyboard. Her musical speech scarcely deviates from that which she developed in a body of work stretching to more than 80 albums, meaning the new psychedelically coloured sounds are powered by the fizzy energy of an improviser in complete command. It’s electrifying music.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Throughout her life, Williams experimented with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she once explained. She was given her first home piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she shared the anecdote of her first "taking apart" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she commented: Williams took off a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor next to her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she explained.

Early on, Williams learned 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 chastised her for embellishing a section. But he saw her potential: the next week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Subsequently, Brubeck refer to Williams "among the finest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was just as awed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, shows her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her extensive studies to study the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before moving backwards to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she soon grew disenchanted with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met 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 poor compensation, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of securing work – and of a corporate industry riding on the coattails of financially strained musicians.

"I am continually disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she stated in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, honest, openly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans woman. As one critic noted: "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."

Forging an Autonomous Career

The artist's trajectory moved toward self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she relocated to 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 immense possibilities of the internet