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

Flipping through the jazz records at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, producer Kye Potter came across a well-used recording by American pianist Jessica Williams. It appeared like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had detached from the tape," he notes. "It was personally duplicated, with printed inserts, a little bit of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector particularly interested in the American musical avant garde following John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared atypical for Williams, who was most famous for producing vibrant jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

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

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to ask if further recordings were available. She responded with four recordings of modified piano from the 1980s – two concert recordings, two made in the studio. And though she had ceased playing publicly years earlier, she also shared some contemporary pieces. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – full releases," Potter explains.

A Legacy Release: 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. However, Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter reveals. Williams had been vocal concerning her struggles after spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "However, I believe her character, fortitude, assurance and the peace she found through meditative practices all were evident in conversation."

Within her more recent synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – defiantly tagged "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a artist trying to escape tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano echoes, reveals that that drive extended back decades. Instead of a homogenous piano sound, the piano creates numerous distinct sonic associations: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, far-off chimes, animals rattling around cages, and small devices sparking to life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with monumental roars collapsing into biting, staccato riffs.

Listener Praise

Guitarist Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the force of her music, but was largely unaware of her surreal-sounding prepared piano prior to this release. Shortly after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Today, that appears completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Artistic Forebears

Her altered piano techniques have technical precursors: reflect on John Cage’s modified instruments, or the innovative methods of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how successfully she merges these new sounds with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The language scarcely deviates from that which she cultivated in a body of work spanning more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are driven by the fizzy energy of an performer in total mastery. This is electrifying music.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Throughout her life, Williams experimented with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she reportedly said. She was given her first vertical piano in 1954. On her blog, she told the story of her first "taking apart" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she noted: Williams removed a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor alongside her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she stated.

Early on, Williams studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for improvising a section. However, he detected her potential: a week later, he introduced her to 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 similarly impressed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, displays her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her dedicated efforts to educate herself the genre – first, to the hipper sounds of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before moving backwards to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she rapidly felt disenchanted with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a strident, public critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "old boys' network," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of securing work – and of a commercial business riding on the coattails of financially strained musicians.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she wrote in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, direct, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a transgender woman. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her desired musical domain 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."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Her professional path evolved into self-sufficiency. Following a period in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she lived in smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling in Portland in 1991, and later relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams saw early on the great promise of the internet