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

Flipping through the jazz aisle at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, collector Kye Potter came across a battered tape by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It looked like the classic independent effort. "The labels had come off the tape," he recalls. "It was copied at home, with xeroxed liners, a touch of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector deeply fascinated by the U.S. experimental scene after John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed atypical for Williams, who was best known for creating vibrant jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a musical experimenter – at her live shows, she required pianos with the top removed to allow her to reach inside and strum the strings – it was a facet that rarely made it on her releases.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to see if additional recordings had been made. She responded with four recordings of prepared piano from the mid 1980s – two live, two studio creations. Even though she had stepped away from public performance some time before, she also enclosed some contemporary pieces. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synth tapes – full releases," Potter recounts.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams in the pandemic era 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. She was 73. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter states. Williams had been public about her hardships after spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "But I think her personality, strength, self-confidence and the serenity she found through meditative practices all were evident in conversation."

In her subsequent 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 artist seeking to break free of expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano reverberations, reveals that that drive extended back decades. Rather than a uniform piano sound, the piano creates numerous distinct sonic associations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, distant church bells, animals rattling around cages, and little machines spluttering into life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with colossal bellows collapsing into biting, staccato riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Musician Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the intensity of her music, but had scant knowledge of her otherworldly prepared piano until this release. Not long after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Today, that appears completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Technical Precursors

Williams’ prepared sounds have artistic antecedents: consider John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the radical techniques of American eccentric Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how effectively she merges these novel textures with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The stylistic approach hardly ever strays from that which she honed in a catalog stretching to more than 80 albums, meaning the new psychedelically coloured sounds are driven by the fizzy energy of an improviser in full control. It’s exhilarating material.

A Constant Innovator

Williams had always experimented with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she once explained. She obtained her first home piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she shared the anecdote of her first "taking apart" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she wrote: Williams detached a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor beside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she stated.

Initially, Williams learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for embellishing a section. But he saw her potential: the next week, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Brubeck would later describe 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, exhibits her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Yet, despite her long journeys to study 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 soon grew disillusioned with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "boys’ club," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of landing performances – and of a commercial business benefiting from the efforts of struggling artists.

"I am continually disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she stated in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, honest, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a transgender woman. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her desired musical domain for a period, imagine what kind of inhumane bullshit she must have suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

Williams’ career evolved into self-sufficiency. After time in the vibrant 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 saw early on the huge potential of the internet