'I'd Never Heard Anything Like It': Those Altered Instrument Discoveries of Jazz Star Jessica Williams

While browsing the jazz aisle at a local record store a few years ago, artist Kye Potter came across a battered tape by musician Jessica Williams. It appeared like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had come off the tape," he notes. "It was copied at home, with printed inserts, a dab of fluorescent marker to accentuate the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector keenly focused on the U.S. experimental scene following John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed unusual from Williams, who was best known for making vibrant jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the California jazz community knew her as a creative innovator – for her concerts, she asked for pianos with the top removed to allow her to access the interior and pluck the strings – it was a facet that seldom found its way on her releases.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to inquire if additional recordings existed. She provided four recordings of prepared piano from the mid 1980s – two live, two recorded in a studio. Even though she had ceased playing publicly previously, she also shared some newer material. "She sent me around 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – full releases," Potter recounts.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams throughout the pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was issued in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter reveals. Williams had been public about her struggles following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "However, I believe her personality, strength, self-confidence and the calmness she found through her spiritual pursuits 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 pianist seeking to transcend expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano resonances, reveals that that drive stretched back decades. In place of a uniform piano sound, the instrument creates numerous distinct sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, beasts in pens, and tiny engines sparking to life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with monumental roars collapsing into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Guitarist Jeff Parker says 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 attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the force 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 "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Artistic Forebears

Williams’ prepared sounds have historical forerunners: consider John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the innovative methods of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how successfully she merges these novel textures with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The language scarcely deviates from that which she developed in a catalog spanning more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new trippily tinted sounds are powered by the effervescent force of an artist in full control. It’s exhilarating material.

A Constant Innovator

Throughout her life, Williams tinkered with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she reportedly said. She received her first vertical piano in 1954. On her blog, she told the story of her first "disassembling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she noted: Williams detached a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor beside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she stated.

Early on, Williams learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for embellishing a section. However, he detected her potential: the next week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

In time, Brubeck describe Williams "a top-tier pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was just as awed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, displays her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Yet, despite her extensive studies to study the genre – first, to the hipper sounds of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before tracing a path back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she soon grew disenchanted with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "old boys' network," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of securing work – and of a commercial business riding on the coattails of struggling artists.

"I am continually disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of core values," she wrote in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, direct, expressly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans woman. A commentator observed: "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 endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

Her professional path evolved into self-sufficiency. After time in the bustling 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 huge potential of the internet