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

Perusing the jazz section at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, artist Kye Potter discovered a worn cassette by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It seemed like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he says. "It was copied at home, with xeroxed liners, a touch of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector particularly interested in the avant-garde movement post John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared atypical for Williams, who was primarily recognized for producing lively jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a sonic explorer – at her live shows, she required pianos without the cover to facilitate to access the interior and play the strings directly – it was a facet that seldom found its way on her albums.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to see if additional recordings had been made. She sent back four recordings of prepared piano from the 1980s – two live, two made in the studio. Even though she had stepped away from public performance some time before, she also shared some contemporary pieces. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – full releases," Potter recounts.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams during the Covid pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was published in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. She was 73. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter states. Williams had been public about her hardships following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "But I think her personality, strength, self-confidence and the peace she found through meditative practices 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 artist trying to transcend expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano resonances, shows that that drive reached back decades. Instead of a consistent piano sound, the piano creates a multitude of sonic associations: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, beasts in pens, and small devices spluttering into life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with colossal bellows dissolving into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Musician Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced 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 dreamlike prepared piano prior to this release. Not long after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Technical Precursors

These modified tones have historical forerunners: consider John Cage’s modified instruments, or the groundbreaking approaches 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 stylistic approach hardly ever strays from that which she developed in a discography extending to more than 80 albums, so that the new trippily tinted sounds are powered by the effervescent force of an performer in full control. It’s thrilling stuff.

A Constant Innovator

Williams consistently explored the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she once explained. She obtained her first home piano in 1954. On her blog, she recounted the tale of her first "disassembling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she commented: Williams took off a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor next to her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she stated.

Williams originally 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 reprimanded her for embellishing a section. However, he detected her potential: a week later, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Subsequently, Brubeck describe 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. Yet, despite her extensive studies to study the genre – first, to the more modern styles 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 was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of securing work – and of a commercial business benefiting from the efforts of struggling artists.

"I am continually disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she penned in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, honest, openly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans individual. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that pushed 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."

Forging an Autonomous Career

The artist's trajectory moved toward self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the bustling Bay Area scene, she lived in smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling in Portland in 1991, and later relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the huge potential of the internet