'An Unprecedented Discovery': The Altered Instrument Discoveries of Jazz Star Jessica Williams

While browsing the jazz aisle at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, artist Kye Potter found a well-used recording by American pianist Jessica Williams. It seemed like the classic independent effort. "The labels had come off the tape," he notes. "It was copied at home, with photocopied notes, a little bit of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector particularly interested in the American musical avant garde post John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt unusual from Williams, who was best known for creating vibrant jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a musical experimenter – at her live shows, she required pianos with the top removed to make it easier to access the interior and play the strings directly – it was a dimension that seldom found its way on her records.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to ask if any more recordings were available. She sent back four recordings of altered piano from the mid-80s – two live, two studio creations. Even though she had ceased playing publicly previously, she also included some recent work. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – full releases," says Potter.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams in the pandemic era to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was released in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, during the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter says. Williams had been public about her difficulties following spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "However, I believe her personality, strength, self-confidence and the calmness she found through having a spiritual practice all shone through in conversation."

Within her more recent synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – defiantly tagged "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a musician attempting to transcend tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano resonances, reveals that that drive extended back decades. In place of a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates a multitude of sonic evocations: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, distant church bells, animals rattling around cages, and small devices spluttering into life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with colossal bellows collapsing into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Musician Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn 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, in search of "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 familiar to me then."

Technical Precursors

These modified tones have technical precursors: reflect on John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the radical techniques of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how successfully she merges these new sounds with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The language hardly ever strays from that which she developed in a catalog extending to more than 80 albums, meaning the new psychedelically coloured sounds are driven by the effervescent force of an improviser in complete command. It’s electrifying music.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams consistently experimented with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she reportedly said. She received her first vertical piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she shared the anecdote of her first "taking apart" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she wrote: Williams detached a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor next to 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 classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for altering a section. However, he detected her potential: the following week, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

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 immersion in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. However, despite her extensive studies 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 rapidly felt 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 outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of getting gigs – and of a corporate industry profiting from the work of financially strained musicians.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of core values," she stated in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was eclectic, direct, openly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a transgender woman. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her desired musical domain 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. Following a period in the active Bay Area scene, she moved through 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