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

Flipping through the jazz records at a local record store a few years ago, producer Kye Potter found a battered tape by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It appeared like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he recalls. "It was personally duplicated, with xeroxed liners, a little bit of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector keenly focused on the avant-garde movement post John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed unusual from Williams, who was primarily recognized for producing vibrant jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the California jazz community knew her as a sonic explorer – during her performances, she requested pianos with the top removed to allow her to access the interior and play the strings directly – it was a aspect that rarely made it on her releases.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to see if any more recordings existed. She sent back four recordings of modified piano from the mid-80s – two performance tapes, two studio creations. And though she had long since retired years earlier, she also enclosed some contemporary pieces. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – entire projects," Potter recounts.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams throughout the pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was issued in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, midway through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter reveals. Williams had been vocal concerning her difficulties after spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "Yet I feel her personality, strength, self-confidence and the calmness she found through meditative practices all shone through in conversation."

In her subsequent 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 musician attempting to escape tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano echoes, reveals that that desire reached back decades. Rather than a consistent piano sound, the instrument creates numerous distinct sonic associations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, far-off chimes, animals rattling around cages, and tiny engines spluttering into life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with monumental roars giving way to growling, sharply accented riffs.

Listener Praise

Guitarist Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the power of her music, but was largely unaware of her otherworldly prepared piano prior to this release. Shortly after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Historical Influences

Her altered piano techniques have artistic antecedents: think of John Cage’s modified instruments, or the innovative methods of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how successfully she blends these novel textures with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. Her musical speech hardly ever strays from that which she developed in a discography stretching to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are driven by the effervescent force of an performer in complete command. This is exhilarating material.

A Constant Innovator

Throughout her life, Williams explored the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she once explained. She obtained her first home 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 under the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor beside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she stated.

Williams originally studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for improvising a section. But he saw her potential: the following week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Brubeck would later describe Williams "one of the greatest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was equally admiring. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, shows her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. However, despite her extensive studies to educate herself the genre – first, to the more modern styles of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before moving backwards to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she rapidly felt disappointed 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 emerged as a strident, public critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, 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 profiting from the work of artists in need.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she penned in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was eclectic, unflinching, openly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans woman. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her preferred musical arena for a period, imagine what kind of terrible treatment she must have suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

Forging an Autonomous Career

Her professional path arced towards self-sufficiency. Following a period in the bustling Bay Area scene, she moved through 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 understood from the beginning the immense possibilities of the internet