'It Was Utterly Unique': Those Altered Instrument Revelations of Jazz Star Jessica Williams

Perusing the jazz aisle at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, producer Kye Potter found a well-used recording by American pianist Jessica Williams. It looked like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had detached from the tape," he recalls. "It was copied at home, with printed inserts, a touch of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector keenly focused on the avant-garde movement after John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared unusual from Williams, who was most famous for creating sparkling jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the West Coast scene knew her as a musical experimenter – at her live shows, she required pianos with the top removed to allow her to get inside and strum the strings – it was a aspect that rarely made it on her records.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to ask if additional recordings existed. She sent back four recordings of prepared piano from the 1980s – two live, two studio creations. Even though she had long since retired some time before, she also enclosed some contemporary pieces. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – full releases," Potter explains.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams throughout the pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was released in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, during the project. She was 73. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter reveals. Williams had been open regarding her hardships after spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "But I think her character, fortitude, assurance and the calmness she found through meditative practices all came out in conversation."

In her subsequent synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – boldly labeled "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a pianist seeking to break free of tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano resonances, demonstrates that that drive stretched back decades. In place of a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates a multitude of sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, animals rattling around cages, and small devices spluttering into life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with massive roars dissolving into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Musician Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the power of her music, but was largely unaware of her surreal-sounding prepared piano before this release. Soon after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Artistic Forebears

Her altered piano techniques have historical forerunners: consider John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the groundbreaking approaches of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how successfully she merges these novel textures with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The stylistic approach scarcely deviates from that which she developed in a body of work stretching to more than 80 albums, meaning the new trippily tinted sounds are fueled by the bubbling vitality of an artist in total mastery. This is electrifying music.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams had always explored the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she once explained. She obtained her first vertical piano in 1954. In her writings, she shared the anecdote of her first "disassembling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she wrote: Williams detached a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor alongside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she explained.

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

Frustration with the Scene

Brubeck would later call Williams "among the finest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was equally admiring. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, exhibits her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her extensive studies 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 disillusioned with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a strident, public critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of getting gigs – and of a profit-driven sector riding on the coattails of artists in need.

"I am continually disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of core values," she stated in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, direct, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a transgender 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 cruel nonsense she must have faced as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

The artist's trajectory arced towards self-sufficiency. After time in the bustling 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