'It Was Utterly Unique': The Altered Instrument Revelations of Pianist Jessica Williams

Flipping through the jazz aisle at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, producer Kye Potter found a well-used recording by American pianist Jessica Williams. It seemed like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had come off the tape," he recalls. "It was personally duplicated, with printed inserts, a little bit of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector particularly interested in the American musical avant garde post John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed out of character for Williams, who was best known for producing sparkling jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the California jazz community knew her as a musical experimenter – at her live shows, she asked for pianos lacking the lid to make it easier to access the interior and play the strings directly – it was a aspect that seldom found its way on her albums.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to ask 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 previously, she also included some recent work. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – entire projects," says Potter.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams throughout the pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was issued in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, during the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter says. Williams had been open regarding her difficulties after spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "Yet I feel her character, fortitude, assurance and the serenity she found through having a spiritual practice all shone through in conversation."

Within her more recent 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 pianist seeking to escape expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano reverberations, reveals that that drive extended back decades. In place of a homogenous piano sound, the piano creates a multitude of sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, far-off chimes, creatures in enclosures, and little machines spluttering into life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with massive roars giving way to growling, sharply accented riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Musician Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the intensity of her music, but was largely unaware of her otherworldly prepared piano before this release. Not long after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Today, that appears completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Historical Influences

Her altered piano techniques have historical forerunners: think of John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the groundbreaking approaches of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how effectively she merges these innovative timbres with her own soulful language at the keyboard. Her musical speech hardly ever strays from that which she honed in a body of work stretching to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are powered by the effervescent force of an improviser in full control. That's electrifying music.

A Constant Innovator

Williams consistently experimented with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she noted in an interview. She was given her first upright piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she recounted the tale of her first "taking apart" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she wrote: Williams detached a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor next to her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she stated.

Williams originally trained in 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 scolded her for altering a section. But he saw her potential: the next week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

Brubeck would later 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 knowledge of jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Yet, despite her dedicated efforts to learn about the genre – first, to the hipper sounds of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before working her way back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she soon grew disappointed with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "boys’ club," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of securing work – and of a profit-driven sector benefiting from the efforts of artists in need.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she penned in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, honest, openly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans woman. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her chosen artistic field for a period, imagine what kind of cruel nonsense she must have suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Williams’ career arced towards self-sufficiency. After time in the active 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 recognized early the huge potential of the internet