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

While browsing the jazz aisle at a local record store a few years ago, collector Kye Potter found a worn cassette by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It looked like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had detached from the tape," he recalls. "It was home-dubbed, with photocopied notes, a touch of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector keenly focused on the American musical avant garde post John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt atypical for Williams, who was most famous for producing lively jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the California jazz community knew her as a sonic explorer – during her performances, she required pianos without the cover to make it easier to reach inside and pluck the strings – it was a aspect that infrequently appeared on her releases.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to see if additional recordings existed. She sent back four recordings of modified piano from the mid-80s – two concert recordings, two recorded in a studio. Although she had long since retired years earlier, she also enclosed some recent work. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synth tapes – full releases," Potter recounts.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams during the Covid pandemic to put together 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. She was 73. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter reveals. Williams had been public about her difficulties after spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "However, I believe her personality, strength, self-confidence and the serenity she found through her spiritual pursuits all were evident in conversation."

In later 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 pianist trying to break free of convention. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano echoes, shows that that impulse stretched back decades. In place of a uniform piano sound, the piano creates a multitude of sonic associations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, animals rattling around cages, and tiny engines spluttering into life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with colossal bellows dissolving into biting, staccato riffs.

Listener Praise

Musician Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the power of her music, but had scant knowledge of her otherworldly prepared piano until this release. Soon after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "surrealism in the improvisational vocals 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."

Technical Precursors

Her altered piano techniques have historical forerunners: think of John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the groundbreaking approaches of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how successfully she merges these new sounds with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. Her musical speech scarcely deviates from that which she developed in a body of work extending to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new trippily tinted sounds are powered by the bubbling vitality of an improviser in total mastery. This is exhilarating material.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams had always explored the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she noted in an interview. She obtained her first home piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she shared the anecdote of her first "dismantling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she wrote: Williams detached a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor next to her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she wrote.

Early on, Williams learned 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 improvising a section. However, he detected her potential: the next week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

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, shows her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. Yet, despite her long journeys to learn about the genre – first, to the more modern styles of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before tracing a path back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she quickly became disappointed with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired 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 "boys’ club," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of getting gigs – and of a commercial business benefiting from the efforts of financially strained musicians.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she wrote in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was eclectic, unflinching, openly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans individual. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her desired musical domain for a period, imagine what kind of inhumane bullshit she must have faced as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

Forging an Autonomous Career

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 great promise of the internet