'I'd Never Heard Anything Like It': Those Altered Instrument Revelations of Pianist Jessica Williams

While browsing the jazz section at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, collector Kye Potter came across a battered tape by American pianist Jessica Williams. It seemed like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had detached from the tape," he recalls. "It was copied at home, with printed inserts, a dab of fluorescent marker to highlight the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector deeply fascinated by the U.S. experimental scene after John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed out of character for Williams, who was primarily recognized for creating vibrant jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a creative innovator – during her performances, she requested pianos lacking the lid to allow her to access the interior and play the strings directly – it was a dimension that seldom found its way on her releases.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to see if any more recordings existed. She responded with four recordings of prepared piano from the 1980s – two concert recordings, two recorded in a studio. Even though she had ceased playing publicly previously, she also shared some newer material. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – entire projects," Potter recounts.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams throughout the pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was published in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. She was 73. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter reveals. Williams had been public about her hardships after spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "However, I believe her personality, strength, self-confidence and the peace she found through meditative practices all were evident in conversation."

Within her more recent 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 attempting to break free of tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano echoes, reveals that that desire stretched back decades. Instead of a homogenous piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic evocations: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, creatures in enclosures, and little machines sparking to life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with colossal bellows dissolving into biting, staccato riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Guitarist Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the force of her music, but was largely unaware of her otherworldly prepared piano until this release. Soon after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Today, that appears completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Historical Influences

These modified tones have artistic antecedents: reflect on John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the innovative methods of American eccentric Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how effectively she fuses these novel textures with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. Her musical speech scarcely deviates from that which she cultivated in a body of work stretching to more than 80 albums, meaning the new psychedelically coloured sounds are powered by the bubbling vitality of an improviser in full control. That's thrilling stuff.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Throughout her life, Williams experimented with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she reportedly said. She obtained her first vertical piano in 1954. In her writings, she recounted the tale of her first "disassembling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she commented: Williams took off a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor alongside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she wrote.

Early on, Williams studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for embellishing a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the next week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Subsequently, Brubeck refer to Williams "a top-tier pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was equally admiring. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, displays her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. Yet, despite her dedicated efforts to learn about the genre – first, to the hipper sounds of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before tracing a path back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she rapidly felt disillusioned with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a strident, public critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of securing work – and of a corporate industry benefiting from the efforts of financially strained musicians.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she penned in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was eclectic, unflinching, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a transgender woman. A commentator observed: "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 faced as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

Forging an Autonomous Career

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 recognized early the great promise of the internet