'It Was Utterly Unique': The Altered Instrument Discoveries of Jazz Star Jessica Williams

While browsing the jazz aisle at a local record store a few years ago, collector Kye Potter found a well-used recording by musician Jessica Williams. It appeared like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he notes. "It was home-dubbed, with printed inserts, a touch of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector deeply fascinated by the avant-garde movement post John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared unusual from Williams, who was primarily recognized for making sparkling jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the West Coast scene knew her as a musical experimenter – for her concerts, she requested pianos with the top removed to facilitate to get inside and strum the strings – it was a aspect that infrequently appeared on her records.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to inquire if additional recordings had been made. She provided four recordings of altered piano from the 1980s – two concert recordings, two made in the studio. And though she had stepped away from public performance years earlier, she also included some newer material. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synth tapes – complete albums," Potter recounts.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams during the Covid pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was released in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, during the project. She was 73. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter reveals. Williams had been open regarding her struggles after spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "Yet I feel her personality, strength, self-confidence and the serenity she found through meditative practices all shone through in conversation."

In later electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – boldly labeled "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a artist attempting to escape tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano resonances, shows that that impulse stretched back decades. Rather than a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates a multitude of sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, distant church bells, animals rattling around cages, and tiny engines spluttering into life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with colossal bellows giving way to biting, staccato riffs.

Listener Praise

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the force of her music, but had scant knowledge of her otherworldly prepared piano prior to this release. Soon after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Now that seems completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Technical Precursors

Williams’ prepared sounds have technical precursors: reflect on John Cage’s modified instruments, or the radical techniques of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how effectively she fuses these novel textures with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The language scarcely deviates from that which she cultivated in a discography stretching to more than 80 albums, so that the new trippily tinted sounds are powered by the bubbling vitality of an improviser in total mastery. That's thrilling stuff.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams had always experimented with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she noted in an interview. She received her first vertical piano in 1954. In her writings, she told the story of her first "disassembling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she wrote: Williams removed a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor alongside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she stated.

Initially, Williams learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for altering a section. Yet he recognized her potential: a week later, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Brubeck would later describe Williams "among the finest 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 knowledge of jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. Yet, despite her long journeys to study the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches 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 was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a strident, public critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of getting gigs – and of a profit-driven sector riding on the coattails of struggling artists.

"I am continually disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of core values," she penned in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was eclectic, direct, decidedly ideological 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

Williams’ career evolved into self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the active Bay Area scene, she relocated to smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, making a home in Portland in 1991, and later going to a more remote location, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams saw early on the immense possibilities of the internet