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

While browsing the jazz records at a local record store a few years ago, artist Kye Potter discovered a battered tape by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It appeared like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had detached from the tape," he says. "It was personally duplicated, with printed inserts, a touch of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector particularly interested in the U.S. experimental scene following John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared unusual from Williams, who was most famous for creating lively jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the West Coast scene knew her as a sonic explorer – for her concerts, she asked for pianos with the top removed to make it easier to get inside and strum the strings – it was a dimension 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 see if further recordings were available. She responded with four recordings of prepared piano from the 1980s – two live, two recorded in a studio. Even though she had ceased playing publicly some time before, she also enclosed some newer material. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synth tapes – entire projects," Potter recounts.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams throughout the pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was published in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, part way through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter says. Williams had been vocal concerning her difficulties following 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 meditative practices all came out in conversation."

Within her more recent synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – boldly labeled "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a pianist trying to escape expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano echoes, demonstrates that that drive stretched back decades. In place of a consistent piano sound, the piano creates a multitude of sonic evocations: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, far-off chimes, animals rattling around cages, and tiny engines coughing to start. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with monumental roars giving way to biting, staccato riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Musician Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the intensity of her music, but knew little of her otherworldly prepared piano until this release. Soon after attending 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 connection with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Historical Influences

These modified tones have technical precursors: think of John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the groundbreaking approaches of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how successfully she blends these innovative timbres with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. Her musical speech rarely departs from that which she honed in a catalog stretching to more than 80 albums, so that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are driven by the effervescent force of an artist in total mastery. It’s exhilarating material.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Throughout her life, Williams experimented with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she reportedly said. She obtained her first upright piano in 1954. On her blog, she recounted the tale of her first "taking apart" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she wrote: Williams removed a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor beside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she explained.

Initially, Williams trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for altering a section. However, he detected her potential: a week later, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

Brubeck would later refer to Williams "one of the greatest 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 knowledge of jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. Yet, despite her extensive studies to educate herself the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before working her way back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she rapidly felt disillusioned with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of landing performances – and of a profit-driven sector benefiting from the efforts of artists in need.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she penned in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was eclectic, honest, openly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans woman. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her chosen artistic field for a period, imagine what kind of cruel nonsense she must have endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

The artist's trajectory moved toward self-sufficiency. Following a period in the active Bay Area scene, she relocated to smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, making a home in Portland in 1991, and later relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams saw early on the huge potential of the internet