'An Unprecedented Discovery': The Altered Instrument Discoveries of Jazz Star Jessica Williams

Perusing the jazz aisle at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, collector Kye Potter came across a battered tape by musician Jessica Williams. It seemed like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had come off the tape," he recalls. "It was copied at home, with photocopied notes, a touch of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector keenly focused on the avant-garde movement following John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared unusual from Williams, who was primarily recognized for producing sparkling jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the West Coast scene knew her as a creative innovator – for her concerts, she asked for pianos lacking the lid to allow her to get inside and play the strings directly – it was a aspect that rarely made it on her albums.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to inquire if additional recordings were available. She sent back four recordings of prepared piano from the 1980s – two live, two made in the studio. Although she had stepped away from public performance some time before, she also included some contemporary pieces. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – full releases," Potter explains.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams during the Covid pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was released in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, during the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter reveals. Williams had been public about her difficulties after spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "But I think her personality, strength, self-confidence and the serenity she found through having a spiritual practice all were evident in conversation."

In her subsequent electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – defiantly tagged "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a musician trying to break free of expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano echoes, demonstrates that that impulse extended back decades. Instead of a homogenous piano sound, the piano creates numerous distinct sonic associations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, remote carillons, creatures in enclosures, and small devices sparking to life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with monumental roars giving way to growling, sharply accented riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the force of her music, but knew little of her surreal-sounding prepared piano before this release. Shortly after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Historical Influences

Her altered piano techniques have artistic antecedents: think of John Cage’s modified instruments, or the innovative methods of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how masterfully she blends these innovative timbres with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The language rarely departs from that which she developed in a discography spanning more than 80 albums, so that the new trippily tinted sounds are fueled by the bubbling vitality of an improviser in complete command. It’s exhilarating material.

A Constant Innovator

Williams consistently experimented with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she once explained. She received her first home piano in 1954. In her writings, she told the story of her first "disassembling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she wrote: Williams took off a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor next to 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 classical repertoire 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: the following week, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Subsequently, Brubeck call Williams "a top-tier 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. Nevertheless, despite her extensive studies to study the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before working her way back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she soon grew disenchanted with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up 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 "boys’ club," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of landing performances – and of a profit-driven sector riding on the coattails of struggling artists.

"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 core values," she stated in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, 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 suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

Williams’ career moved toward self-sufficiency. After time in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling in Portland in 1991, and later moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams saw early on the immense possibilities of the internet