'I'd Never Heard Anything Like It': The Altered Instrument Discoveries of Pianist Jessica Williams

Perusing the jazz section at a local record store a few years ago, artist Kye Potter came across a well-used recording by musician Jessica Williams. It seemed like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had detached from the tape," he says. "It was home-dubbed, with photocopied notes, a little bit of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector deeply fascinated by the U.S. experimental scene post John Cage, Potter was intrigued 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.

Although the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a sonic explorer – during her performances, she requested pianos with the top removed to allow her to reach inside and pluck the strings – it was a aspect that infrequently appeared on her records.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to see if any more recordings had been made. She responded with four recordings of modified piano from the 1980s – two concert recordings, two studio creations. And though she had long since retired years earlier, she also shared some newer material. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – complete albums," Potter explains.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams during the Covid pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was released in late 2025. However, Williams died 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 difficulties following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "Yet I feel her personality, strength, self-confidence and the serenity she found through meditative practices all came out in conversation."

In her subsequent 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 pianist attempting to escape expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano resonances, shows that that drive reached back decades. In place of a consistent piano sound, the instrument creates numerous distinct sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, animals rattling around cages, and small devices sparking to life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with colossal bellows collapsing into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Guitarist Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the power of her music, but had scant knowledge of her surreal-sounding prepared piano until this release. Shortly after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Now that seems completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Technical Precursors

Williams’ prepared sounds have artistic antecedents: consider John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the innovative methods of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how masterfully she blends these new sounds with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The stylistic approach hardly ever strays from that which she honed in a body of work extending to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new trippily tinted sounds are powered by the fizzy energy of an performer in full control. That's thrilling stuff.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams consistently tinkered with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she once explained. She received her first upright piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she shared the anecdote of her first "dismantling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she noted: Williams removed a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor next to 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 classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for embellishing a section. But he saw her potential: the following week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

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, displays her deep absorption 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 was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the elder pianist'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 landing performances – and of a corporate industry profiting from the work 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 sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, honest, 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 drove her from her preferred musical arena for a period, imagine what kind of inhumane bullshit she must have endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Williams’ career evolved into self-sufficiency. After time in the bustling Bay Area scene, she lived in smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, moving to Portland in 1991, and later going to a more remote location, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams saw early on the great promise of the internet