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

Flipping through the jazz section at a local record store a few years ago, collector Kye Potter came across a worn cassette by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It looked like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had come off the tape," he recalls. "It was home-dubbed, with photocopied notes, a touch of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector particularly interested in the avant-garde movement post John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt atypical for Williams, who was most famous for making vibrant jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a creative innovator – at her live shows, she required pianos lacking the lid to allow her to reach inside and play the strings directly – it was a aspect that rarely made it on her albums.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to ask if any more recordings had been made. She responded with four recordings of altered piano from the 1980s – two concert recordings, two recorded in a studio. Although she had long since retired some time before, she also shared some newer material. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synth tapes – entire projects," Potter explains.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams during the Covid pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was issued in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, midway through 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 prevented her from tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "Yet I feel her personality, strength, self-confidence and the serenity she found through having a spiritual practice all came out in conversation."

Within her more recent synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – explicitly categorized "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a artist seeking to break free of convention. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano reverberations, reveals that that desire stretched back decades. Rather than a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates a multitude of sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, animals rattling around cages, and tiny engines spluttering into life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with colossal bellows collapsing into biting, staccato riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Musician Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the intensity of her music, but knew little of her surreal-sounding prepared piano until this release. Soon after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Historical Influences

These modified tones have technical precursors: reflect on John Cage’s modified instruments, or the innovative methods of American eccentric Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how masterfully she merges these new sounds with her own soulful language at the keyboard. Her musical speech hardly ever strays from that which she cultivated in a catalog spanning more than 80 albums, meaning the new psychedelically coloured sounds are fueled by the bubbling vitality of an improviser in complete command. That's electrifying music.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Throughout her life, Williams tinkered with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she once explained. She obtained her first home piano in 1954. In her writings, she recounted the tale of her first "taking apart" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she wrote: Williams detached a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor next to her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she stated.

Early on, Williams trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for altering a section. But he saw her potential: the next week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Subsequently, Brubeck refer to 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 absorption in jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. Yet, despite her extensive studies to learn about 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 disappointed with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of getting gigs – and of a commercial business riding on the coattails of struggling artists.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she wrote in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, honest, expressly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a transgender 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 endured 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 bustling 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 huge potential of the internet