'An Unprecedented Discovery': Those Altered Instrument Revelations of Jazz Star Jessica Williams

Perusing the jazz aisle at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, artist Kye Potter found a well-used recording by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It looked like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he notes. "It was home-dubbed, with xeroxed liners, a touch of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector keenly focused on the American musical avant garde post John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed unusual from Williams, who was most famous for producing sparkling jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a sonic explorer – for her concerts, she required pianos without the cover to facilitate to access the interior and pluck the strings – it was a aspect that seldom found its way on her albums.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to inquire if additional recordings were available. She provided four recordings of prepared piano from the 1980s – two performance tapes, 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 synthesizer recordings – entire projects," says Potter.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams during the Covid pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was released in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, midway through the project. She was 73. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter reveals. Williams had been open regarding her struggles after spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer 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 were evident in conversation."

In later electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – boldly labeled "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a artist attempting to transcend convention. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano echoes, shows that that impulse reached back decades. Rather than a homogenous piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, far-off chimes, creatures in enclosures, and little machines spluttering into life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with monumental roars dissolving into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Listener Praise

Guitarist Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the intensity of her music, but had scant knowledge of her surreal-sounding prepared piano before this release. Shortly after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Now that seems completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Artistic Forebears

These modified tones have technical precursors: consider John Cage’s modified instruments, or the innovative methods of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how masterfully she merges these novel textures with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The language hardly ever strays from that which she developed in a discography spanning more than 80 albums, so that the new trippily tinted sounds are driven by the effervescent force of an improviser in total mastery. That's electrifying music.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Throughout her life, Williams explored the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she noted in an interview. She received her first upright piano in 1954. On her blog, she shared the anecdote of her first "taking apart" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she wrote: 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.

Initially, Williams trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for embellishing a section. However, he detected her potential: the following week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

In time, Brubeck refer to 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, displays her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Yet, despite her dedicated efforts to educate herself the genre – first, to the more modern styles of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before working her way back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she quickly became disappointed with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "old boys' network," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of getting gigs – and of a corporate industry benefiting from the efforts of struggling artists.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she stated in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was eclectic, unflinching, openly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans individual. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her preferred musical arena 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."

Forging an Autonomous Career

The artist's trajectory moved toward self-sufficiency. After time in the active Bay Area scene, she lived in 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 understood from the beginning the great promise of the internet