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

Perusing the jazz records at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, collector Kye Potter found a worn cassette by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It appeared like the classic independent effort. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he recalls. "It was personally duplicated, with photocopied notes, a little bit of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

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

If the California jazz community knew her as a musical experimenter – at her live shows, she asked for pianos lacking the lid to facilitate to access the interior and pluck the strings – it was a facet that infrequently appeared on her albums.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to inquire if any more recordings had been made. She responded with four recordings of prepared piano from the 1980s – two live, two made in the studio. And though she had stepped away from public performance years earlier, she also enclosed some contemporary pieces. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synth tapes – entire projects," says Potter.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams throughout the pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was issued in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, midway through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter says. Williams had been open regarding her struggles following spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "But I think her character, fortitude, assurance and the calmness she found through her spiritual pursuits all were evident in conversation."

In her subsequent synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – explicitly categorized "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a pianist trying to break free of expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano reverberations, shows that that drive reached back decades. Instead of a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic impressions: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, far-off chimes, animals rattling around cages, and tiny engines sparking to life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with massive roars dissolving into biting, staccato riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Guitarist Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the power of her music, but was largely unaware of her dreamlike prepared piano before this release. Soon after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Today, that appears completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Artistic Forebears

Williams’ prepared sounds have technical precursors: reflect on John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the innovative methods of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how masterfully she merges these innovative timbres with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The language hardly ever strays from that which she honed in a discography extending to more than 80 albums, so that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are driven by the effervescent force of an performer in complete command. That's thrilling stuff.

A Constant Innovator

Williams had always tinkered with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she once explained. She was given her first vertical piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she recounted the tale of her first "dismantling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she noted: Williams took off a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor next to her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she stated.

Early on, Williams studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures 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. But he saw her potential: the next week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

Subsequently, Brubeck call 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 characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her extensive studies 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 disenchanted with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a strident, public critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "boys’ club," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of securing work – and of a profit-driven sector riding on the coattails of struggling artists.

"I am continually disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of core values," she wrote in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, direct, openly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans 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 inhumane bullshit she must have faced as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Williams’ career evolved into self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint 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 huge potential of the internet