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

Flipping through the jazz records at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, collector Kye Potter found a battered tape by musician Jessica Williams. It seemed like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had come off the tape," he says. "It was copied at home, with photocopied notes, a dab of fluorescent marker to accentuate the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector deeply fascinated by the avant-garde movement post John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed unusual from Williams, who was best known for producing sparkling jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the West Coast scene knew her as a musical experimenter – during her performances, she asked for pianos without the cover to facilitate to reach inside and pluck the strings – it was a aspect that seldom found its way on her releases.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to inquire if any more recordings had been made. She sent back four recordings of altered piano from the 1980s – two concert recordings, two studio creations. And though she had stepped away from public performance some time before, she also enclosed some recent work. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synth tapes – entire projects," Potter explains.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams throughout the pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was released in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter reveals. Williams had been open regarding her difficulties after spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "However, I believe her character, fortitude, assurance and the serenity she found through her spiritual pursuits all shone through 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 seeking to break free of convention. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano reverberations, reveals that that impulse reached back decades. Rather than a uniform piano sound, the instrument creates a multitude of sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, remote carillons, animals rattling around cages, and small devices sparking to life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with monumental roars giving way to growling, sharply accented riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Musician Jeff Parker says 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 power of her music, but had scant knowledge of her dreamlike prepared piano until this release. Shortly after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Artistic Forebears

Her altered piano techniques have artistic antecedents: consider John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the groundbreaking approaches of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how successfully she merges these novel textures with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The language rarely departs from that which she developed in a body of work extending to more than 80 albums, meaning the new trippily tinted sounds are fueled by the effervescent force of an performer in total mastery. It’s electrifying music.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Throughout her life, Williams tinkered with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she once explained. She was given her first home piano in 1954. In her writings, she shared the anecdote of her first "disassembling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she noted: Williams detached a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor beside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she explained.

Williams originally trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for altering a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the next week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

Brubeck would later refer to 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, shows her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. However, despite her extensive studies to study the genre – first, to the more modern styles of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before tracing a path back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she soon grew disappointed with the jazz world.

Following her relocation 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 "boys’ club," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of getting gigs – and of a commercial business benefiting from the efforts of struggling artists.

"I am continually disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she stated in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was eclectic, honest, openly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans woman. A commentator observed: "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."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Her professional path arced towards self-sufficiency. Following a period in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, moving to Portland in 1991, and later moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams understood from the beginning the immense possibilities of the internet