'I'd Never Heard Anything Like It': Those Altered Instrument Revelations of Pianist Jessica Williams

Perusing the jazz aisle at a local record store a few years ago, producer Kye Potter discovered a battered tape by musician Jessica Williams. It appeared like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had come off the tape," he recalls. "It was personally duplicated, with printed inserts, a dab of fluorescent marker to accentuate the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector keenly focused on the American musical avant garde after John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed unusual from Williams, who was primarily recognized for making sparkling jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the West Coast scene knew her as a musical experimenter – for her concerts, she required pianos without the cover to allow her to reach inside and pluck the strings – it was a dimension that rarely made it on her records.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to inquire if further recordings were available. She provided four recordings of modified piano from the mid 1980s – two live, two made in the studio. Even though she had ceased playing publicly previously, she also shared some contemporary pieces. "She sent me around 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – entire projects," says Potter.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams in the pandemic era to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was published in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter states. Williams had been open regarding her hardships after spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "Yet I feel her character, fortitude, assurance and the peace she found through her spiritual pursuits all shone through in conversation."

In later electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – defiantly tagged "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a artist seeking to escape convention. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano reverberations, demonstrates that that impulse reached back decades. In place of a homogenous piano sound, the piano creates a multitude of sonic associations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, far-off chimes, creatures in enclosures, and little machines coughing to start. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with massive roars collapsing into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Musician Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the power of her music, but was largely unaware of her surreal-sounding prepared piano until this release. Shortly after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Now that seems completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Historical Influences

Williams’ prepared sounds have historical forerunners: think of John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the innovative methods of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how masterfully she merges these innovative timbres with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The language scarcely deviates from that which she cultivated in a discography extending to more than 80 albums, so that the new trippily tinted sounds are powered by the effervescent force of an improviser in full control. It’s electrifying music.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams had always explored the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she noted in an interview. She received 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 removed a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor next to her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she explained.

Initially, Williams learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for embellishing a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the next week, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

In time, Brubeck describe Williams "one of the greatest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was just as awed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, exhibits her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her long journeys to study 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 quickly became disenchanted with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged 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 "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of securing work – and of a corporate industry profiting from the work of struggling artists.

"I am continually disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she stated in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, unflinching, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans woman. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her chosen artistic field for a period, imagine what kind of terrible treatment she must have faced as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Williams’ career moved toward self-sufficiency. After time in the bustling Bay Area scene, she lived in 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 recognized early the great promise of the internet