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

While browsing the jazz records at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, producer Kye Potter discovered a worn cassette by musician Jessica Williams. It seemed like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had detached from the tape," he recalls. "It was personally duplicated, with photocopied notes, a little bit of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector deeply fascinated by the U.S. experimental scene post John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared unusual from Williams, who was primarily recognized for creating sparkling jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a musical experimenter – during her performances, she asked for pianos without the cover to make it easier to access the interior and play the strings directly – it was a aspect that rarely made it on her releases.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to ask if further recordings were available. She provided four recordings of altered piano from the 1980s – two concert recordings, two studio creations. And though she had ceased playing publicly some time before, she also shared some recent work. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – entire projects," Potter explains.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams during the Covid pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was published in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, during the project. She was 73. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter reveals. Williams had been vocal concerning her struggles following spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "However, I believe her character, fortitude, assurance and the peace she found through having a spiritual practice all were evident 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 artist trying to transcend tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano reverberations, reveals that that desire extended back decades. Instead of a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates numerous distinct sonic impressions: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, far-off chimes, beasts in pens, and tiny engines spluttering into life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with colossal bellows collapsing into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Musician Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the force of her music, but was largely unaware of her surreal-sounding prepared piano before this release. Not long after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Artistic Forebears

These modified tones have technical precursors: consider John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the innovative methods of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how successfully she merges these novel textures with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The language rarely departs from that which she cultivated 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 total mastery. It’s exhilarating material.

A Constant Innovator

Williams consistently tinkered with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she once explained. She received her first home piano in 1954. On her blog, she shared the anecdote of her first "disassembling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she noted: Williams took off a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor next to her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she wrote.

Williams originally trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for embellishing a section. However, he detected her potential: the following week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Brubeck would later refer to 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, displays her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her extensive studies to educate herself 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.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "boys’ club," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of landing performances – and of a commercial business riding on the coattails of financially strained musicians.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of core values," she stated in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was eclectic, honest, expressly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans woman. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that chased 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."

A Journey of Independence

The artist's trajectory arced towards self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the bustling Bay Area scene, she lived in 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 great promise of the internet