Brooklyn-based guitarist, singer, songwriter and composer Ava Mendoza is active in a wide range of bands and projects, including her experimental rock trio Unnatural Ways, a trio with William Parker and Gerald Cleaver and the amazing Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet. However, at Summer Bummer she presented one of her fascinating solo performances in which she tends toward a very specific approach using guitar and voice. In the middle of a hectic European tour, Ava found the time to answer a few of our questions by email.

Most or maybe all of your solo recordings consist of compositions/songs with room for improvisation. Do you use a similar approach for solo concerts? Or do you sometimes just start from a blank page: you plug in and play?

It’s similar for solo concerts I play my own songs/compositions with some improvising. I’ve never been very interested in my own solo free improvising to be honest. I’m more into the social aspect of free improvisation, of people finding a way to talk together, each using their own language. For solo, for me it’s more about songwriting, composition and finding good places within the forms where things can open up into improvising.

Your musical background is broad spectrum ranging from South American folk traditions and classical music to rock, blues and (free)jazz. Could you pick out certain music- or sound-related events, records, people, … that were more or less pivotal in the way you think and feel about music now?
Sonny Sharrock’s Black Woman, Ask the Ages (with Pharoah Sanders) and everything else; Jimmy “Duck” Holmes’ Cypress Grove; Ronald Shannon Jackson’s Decoding Society, especially Man Dance and Barebecue Dog; Jessie Mae Hemphill Run Get My Shotgun; Ornette Coleman’s Primetime records; Chrome – Alien Soundtracks; Geraldine Fibbers – Butch and Lost Somewhere Between the Earth and My Home; Keiji Haino and Fushitsusha.

You studied classical guitar during your youth. What’s your favorite classical work for guitar? Or in general?
I still love many of Leo Brouwer’s compositions. I play a hybrid style now, I’m using a pick and also fingers. His Etudes Simples are designed for fingerstyle playing of course, but I’ve found they’re also a really great way to practice or warm up as a hybrid player. You can practice even attack and tone with pick, middle and ring finger. Besides Brouwer’s music, there are many classical guitar works that I still think are fantastic. Toru Takemitsu’s All in Twilight and Benjamin Britten’s Nocturnal are high on the list.

You’re part of the Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet that toured Europe recently and that played the music he initially recorded solo on multitrack. Is the quartet meant to explore his music further?
The quartet just played Jazz em Agosto in Lisbon. Bill is going to write a second record for us now, which will come out in the first half of 2025. There will definitely be more touring around that.
Another one of your collaborators is William Parker, who has been releasing tons of work in recent years.

Another one of your collaborators is William Parker, who has been releasing tons of work in recent years. One of the recordings that really stood out was the trio with you and Gerald Cleaver on the album called Mayan Space Station. It might even be the first time I heard William play with an electric guitarist. Is there any possibility that the trio will perform again? I think a lot of people would want to see that!
Yeah definitely! We played at Vossa Jazz in Norway in the spring, and hopefully will do more stuff in Europe in the future. This September we have a short tour in Texas coming up, set up by Pedro Moreno in Austin. William has played and recorded with Joe Morris and Derek Bailey over the years, but not too many other electric guitarists, it’s true. It’s an honor to play and I really feel like I can do anything with him and Gerald.

How was this trio initiated?
In 2019 William called Gerald and me to play two nights as a trio at a venue called Happy Lucky No. 1 in Brooklyn. They both went really well, but afterward I didn’t know if we would do anything more. Then 6 months later, right before the pandemic hit, he called me to record with the same trio, and that’s where the record came from. We recorded for maybe 3-4 hours, all improvised. Except on “Canyons of Light,” William told me to play something real high pitched at the beginning, and said that then he would play some composed material on bass, So I went “eeeeeeeeeeeee!” on guitar and he played, and that was the only composed part of the record.

Your father comes from Bolivia and you’ve always been connected to immigrant communities in the States. Borders (physical, musical, …) also seem to be an underlying theme in your life and music, from travelling to other countries to play and blending different genres and styles of music to the theme of ‘The Paranoia Party’, an album by your band Unnatural Ways. The politics in the States around border issues have been extremely right wing, hard and inhumane. How do you see it evolve in the current race for the White House?
I’m a total mutt background wise— half Bolivian yes, which for me means part Quechua, part Basque, part Spanish. And then on the other side my mom’s American— part Irish, part Bosnian, part Croatian. And I’m from the US, which is a country of immigrants. So, the concept of clear borders, or of a simple national identity, has always seemed really funny to me, at best! I just think it’s sort of intrinsically absurd and insecure. Cultural identity is important, understanding history and tradition is important, but any kind of nationalism or idea of closed national borders I don’t get. The US has always had the idea of Latin America as its backyard. We’ve gotten our cheap labor from Central America for decades, we’ve gotten our cheap resources and backed right wing coups and, in some cases, full on genocides there and in South America. We’ve caused fundamental destabilization. In that sense, we’ve made sure that Latin America’s borders are very open to US intervention. And at the very least the “payoff” is that we open our borders in return; take responsibility and allow people to move here after when we’ve exploited, sanctioned or otherwise hamstringed their economies.

What music have you been listening to lately that you’d like to share or recommend?
Arsenio Rodríguez is someone I never really sat down with until recently. Growing up my family listened to some Cuban music so I heard songs of his here and there, he’s sort of the great granddaddy of salsa. But I thought of him as a bandleader/arranger and didn’t realize what a great guitarist he is until recently. He plays tres, a smaller Cuban guitar— and has such a cool feel and is sort of spazzy and almost pre-no-wavey in a way sometimes, haha!

What are your plans for the near future regarding composing, recording, releasing or performing?
I have a new solo record coming out this fall called The Circular Train. It will be released in October on Bill Orcutt’s label, Palilalia, and there will be some shows and touring around that. Violinist gabby fluke-mogul and I have a duo record that’s almost finished, and that will come out in the next six months I think too. And I have a record featuring poet Abiodun Oyewole (Last Poets) that I have been trying to find time to finish. It’s a great band featuring Devin Brahja Waldman (sax), Alex Marcelo (keys), Luke Stewart (bass) and Ches Smith (drums).