Tone Glow 215: Ava Mendoza
The third in a series of five interviews with the Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet. Ava Mendoza talks about the mining history of her ancestors, her love for playing solo, and her growth as a guitarist.
All week, Tone Glow is hosting five different interviews in celebration of Bill Orcutt’s residency at Roulette and new album Music in Continuous Motion. The series will feature individual interviews with all four members of the Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet and conclude with a group interview. The other interviews can be found here: Bill Orcutt, Shane Parish, Wendy Eisenberg, and the Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet.
Ava Mendoza
Ava Mendoza (b. 1983) is a guitarist, improviser, and composer based in New York. Throughout her career, Mendoza has played in numerous bands, including the bluesy Bolivar Zoar, the no wave group Mute Socialite, the noise rock act Unnatural Ways, and the jazz-rock outfit Mendoza Hoff Revels. She’s also released multiple solo records, such as New Spells (2021) and The Circular Train (2024). She has an upcoming album titled Alive Alone, Alive Together (2026) coming out this spring via Burning Ambulance. Mendoza is also part of the Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet, who will perform this Friday at Roulette. Joshua Minsoo Kim spoke with Mendoza on February 25th, 2026 to discuss the mining history of her ancestors, her recent love for solo music, and how she’s grown as a guitarist.
Joshua Minsoo Kim: This is a bit random, but I know that you were on an album with Kurt Heyl called 1, 2, 3, Infinity (2004). What can you tell me about him? I think he’s the same guy who used to live in Chicago and make experimental films in the 1960s.
Ava Mendoza: I didn’t know he did all that, but he was an eclectic guy. He’s a trombone player who used a lot of preparations, and he used to play with Jack Wright—they were like music brothers. I lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico for one year when I was 19. I played with a lot of weirdo improvisers in the area and Kurt was one of them. He lived off in the mountains with his wife. They had electricity and water, I think, but it was a zone where some people lived without that too. They were just all about that nature life.
Speaking of nature, I know that your mother and father both have these histories related to working in mines. Do you have any relationship with mining in general?
It’s not directly my mom and my dad—it’s going back a few generations. My mom’s from Montana and my grandfather was mine-adjacent—he was a mining engineer—and my great-granddad was a miner who eventually passed away from black lung. Other people in my family worked in mines on their way from Ireland to Montana—they worked at these mining camps that led out West. They eventually landed in Butte, Montana, which is a mining town. For my dad, the woman who raised him—his grandmother, so my great-grandma—is Quechua and from this area of Bolivia that’s famous for its silver mines. As far as we could put things together, she was one of these women—palliris—who sat outside the mines and broke the rocks apart, cleaning them to find the actual minerals. She did that when she was very young, and then she hooked up with my doctor great-grandfather and had a slightly more cush life after that. I’m able to trace her family through online church records that go back 200 years. According to those records, her family lived in that region and it seemed like they all worked around the mines because that was the only economy there.
I have never mined, but I have been in mines a few times in the US and in Bolivia. It’s kind of a recent thing where I’m realizing that both sides of my family were involved with mining—we weren’t totally aware of this on the Bolivian side. 15 years ago, I took a tour of the most famous mines in Bolivia, in this city called Potosí, and it has all these silver mines. I felt a lot. It really had an impact on me and I kept thinking about it for years afterwards. There’s something about being inside the earth—and coming from where I’m coming from, where I never had to work in mines—that felt so good to me. I’m aware that it’s really difficult and dangerous and there’s tons of toxins getting inside your lungs, but when I was there, I just wanted to stay.
There’s a deity of the mines in Bolivia called El Tío, and he looks like the Devil—he’s this syncretism of Andean religion and Christianity. There will be altars to him within the mines. You’ll go into a tiny room off of one of the tunnels, and there will be El Tío with his horns sitting there, and people bring offerings to him—booze and cigarettes and cocoa leaves and packages of food. He’ll be covered in confetti with all these offerings, and that’s just a facet of life in the mines. He protects the miners. And that mythology has really stuck with me. The thing about El Tío is he’s not just in the mines, he’s everywhere in Bolivia. similar to Mexico and lots of places in Latin America, devils aren’t bad and can be fun—they’re part of Carnaval and all of that. It’s hard not to think of El Tío when you go to Bolivia.
It wasn’t until five or six years ago, when I had this awareness of my mom’s side being involved with the mines, that I started to get really curious about my great grandma. She’s everyone’s favorite in the family—everyone loved her. I didn’t understand until more recently that she was Quechua and had come from a country background and moved to a small city to raise her family. She left this life that had all this Quechua culture and work in the mines, and I’ve been trying to learn more about that over the years.
What’s been the most nourishing thing you’ve learned while looking into this?
Hmm. That’s very interesting. There’s a lot of hardship that I’ve found out about. She left really young, and hopefully it was consensual, but it’s not totally clear. What is nourishing is that she was this extremely loving person. She left a child behind in her hometown, so she had to distance herself from a lot, but she stayed this extremely loving person who raised a new family—her new children and grandchildren.
What was your own childhood like? Can you tell me what it was like growing up with your parents? I know your mom had an art history degree.
Whoa, how do you know this? Well, there was always music around in the house, and a lot of different kinds—she liked classical music. Both my parents liked Andean music, but also music from all over Latin America. I grew up with lots of Andean music, Caribbean music, Brazilian music, Afro-Peruvian music. There wasn’t that much contemporaneous American pop, but there were oldies from the ’50s and ’60s. I remember being fascinated by it all. In terms of the art background and where my mom came from, I remember looking at art books with her. She’d tell me who people were and we’d go through the same books again and again. When I was a little I’d be like, “That’s Max Ernst!” (laughter). That’s something that stuck with her because there was a fuzzy creature in one of his paintings that I liked. I remember she was really into Marc Chagall. We’d go to museums together and spend a long time there staring at paintings, wondering about the colors and shapes.
What Andean music were you listening to? Stuff like Los Kjarkas?
Yeah! We definitely had Los Kjarkas records. Savia Andina were big, and Inti-Illimani were Chilean but had a lot of Andean folk music. Those were the two big ones. There’s also Atahualpa Yupanqui, who is this super awesome North Argentine guy.
How do you feel like they shaped your understanding of the guitar? I know you played classical guitar growing up—Carcassi, Giuliani, Bach—but what about this Andean music?
I couldn’t articulate it for a long time, but they absolutely did play a role. The approach to rhythm in that music—I grew up hearing a lot of shifting between different feels, like from a 6/8 triplet feel to a 4/4 feel. The approach to syncopation and polyrhythm is distinctly not Western American. That all definitely shaped me.
When you get into the proggy territories, do you feel like you’re drawing from that? Or do you feel like you’re just drawing from American and European prog rock bands?
This is a question of the chicken or the egg. I’m definitely drawing on American and European prog, but even if my frame of reference is Captain Beefheart, it’s like, why did I like Captain Beefheart in the first place? It’s because my ears were already opened to hearing this shiftiness; I was already comfortable with this idea of, “Where’s the 1?” I didn’t necessarily know where the 1 was, but I liked that feeling.
Do you remember the first things you were listening to and searching for on your own? Based on your age, you were a teenager around the time Napster came around.
I lived around 45 minutes south of LA, so things would trickle down. I got into the Dead Kennedys and Black Flag and stuff like that. I wanted to find bands that were more current, and I was a fan of LA punk bands that were around. The Geraldine Fibbers were a big one, the Red Aunts were another. I remember downloading Lunachicks when I was 14 and thinking I needed to hear Pretty Ugly (1996). That was all stuff I got into on my own, and definitely with discouragement from my family.
Is there a moment you can pinpoint when you knew you needed to pursue music?
There were so many different moments, I would say. There would be moments of practicality as well, where I was like, “No no no, I shouldn’t do that.” So it was back and forth. I pursued music really seriously in high school—I went to this boarding school in Northern Michigan called Interlochen. It’s a hardcore and traditional track for straight-ahead jazz and classical music. I was on the classical guitar path, and I was serious about it, but what really solidified it for me was when I was in my second year of college. I thought there was no future in studying music, so I thought I should just play it for fun on my own and study something else. For one year, I studied anthropology and, by the end of that year, I realized that I just couldn’t not play music. I went back, and that’s what kept me going.
So this is completely separate from when you were at CalArts?
I was at CalArts for one year, then I went to Santa Fe for one year, then I went to Mills for one year for anthropology.
You did anthropology at Mills College? I didn’t even know people did that (laughter).
Dude, it was a really bad department (laughter). It was such a mistake. I wanted to move to Oakland because I knew a couple people there and liked the music. I also knew Mills had a good music department, and I knew an anthropology department existed, so I thought, oh I’ll just be around all this music. But yeah, their anthropology department sucked—it was like the last 40 years hadn’t been processed. Everything was dated.
You were traveling all throughout your mid to late teens. Do you feel like there’s anything significant about all the travels you did at that age?
My family moved a few times when I grew up. I was born in Miami, we moved to Evanston when I was 2, then we moved to Chicago proper, and then we moved to Southern California when I was 10. I was there for three years before I went to Interlochen. So it was a lot of moving, and my parents also liked to travel, so we would go to Bolivia when we could and we took a couple trips to Europe. Travel was a constant for me, and it’s definitely a huge facet of my music, especially my solo music. I think of a lot of it as music for cars and trains, and I’ve written a lot of it on the go. I write a lot in the car. If it’s something I’m working on for the first time, I’ll sing something into my phone, I’ll come up with a rhythm and drum it on my wheel. As a piece evolves, I keep working on it in the car. I’ll record it at home, I’ll drive around and listen to it, I’ll think about how it fits with the mood of the landscape or city I’m in. I’ll come up with new arrangement ideas, too.
Being in motion is very natural for me, more so than being in one place. That, actually, can actually be harder for me. Sometimes to get my music ideas going, I’ll need to take a ride, or it won’t come until I’m on a train or in the airport. I think I just got really accustomed to the feeling of going, growing up the way I did. There wasn’t a house that was constant, there was no home I went back to. But at some point in my life I had to be like, “I’d really like a home.” I couldn’t just tour and travel my whole life; it’s not healthy. But for a long time, the feeling of being in motion was the most comfortable thing.
Can you tell me about Santa Fe? What was going on there?
There was a guitarist that I went to study with. His name is Stefan Dill—he played with Cecil Taylor and other people I found interesting. I met him at a friend’s wedding and I liked his playing. I just said, “What if I come and study with you in Santa Fe?” I liked the desert and the land around there, and while I didn’t know if I liked the actual city, I wanted a year out of school, I needed a breath. When I was in Santa Fe, that was my first time gigging. There were enough opportunities to play and enough musicians who were willing to take me under their wing. It was a really fun and relatively safe place to start playing for a 19-year-old girl. It was great on that level. And Stefan hooked me up with some of those gigs, too.
One thing I’ve noticed about different places I’ve lived in is that the smaller the bubble, the bigger risks people are willing to take. It felt like people took more risks in Santa Fe. If you did something where you looked stupid on stage, it wasn’t career-ending—it was for friends and family. So it was positive in that way; it was easier, mentally, to go out on a limb. And once you learn how to do that as an improviser, you can keep that with you when you go to a bigger bubble. I went to the Bay Area, which is bigger, and then I moved to New York, which is arguably the biggest bubble for this kind of music in the country. I’ve noticed that people really don’t take risks here.
I know you were in two different bands while in Oakland. Bolivar Zoar had this bluesy improv thing going on. And then Mute Socialite is more of a no wave band. What was it like playing in those two bands? You were in your early 20s then.
As far as I remember, they formed around the same time. Bolivar Zoar was with these two girls who went to Mills with me—Theresa Wong and Maryclare Brzytwa. We were all just friends and I think we played Theresa’s birthday or something. She said, “Let’s just come up with two songs!” There was this chemistry there. I was listening to The Jesus Lizard at the time, Theresa was a cellist but wanted to learn basslines, and Maryclare was a really good flute player but wanted to play prepared acoustic guitar and scream. So we all had this chance to do these things in Bolivar Zoar, and it didn’t sound like any of the stuff that we were referencing. It was a lot of fun. That went on for two years, but it was never a weekly rehearsing band; we’d do a couple rehearsals before a show.
I loved the writing aspect of that band. I was so ready to play songs and rock out, even though Bolivar Zoar isn’t exactly about rocking out (laughter). And that came very naturally. Like with any band, we all had different backgrounds and artistic differences, so we had different songwriting styles. Listening to Bolivar Zoar today, it’s so hilarious hearing each song next to each other. The chemistry was so great and interesting, but it was inevitable that we’d go our separate ways because we had such different interests.
At this point in my life, it was very much about finding myself, writing-wise. With Mute Socialite, I was listening to The Birthday Party and The Blue Humans and trying to write no wave-y stuff like that. I had been listening to that music for a long time, but I just never found people to play that with. We were so loud—there were two drummers—and it was so fun to play that loud. And then there was my first solo record, Shadow Stories (2010), and that was, for lack of a better word, Americana standards along with some of my own writing. It was me figuring out what was possible for me on solo guitar, and it was vastly different from the bands I was playing in. My solo work came in part from my classical background—a lot of things on that record are fingerstyle—and what I loved was the chord-melody stuff, and accompanying your lines on guitar. That’s not really a thing when you’re playing in a no wave band. I think of that time as a time of developing; I was figuring out different facets of my playing and seeing how they could be combined, and whether that worked or not.
What’s it like when you write songs now? Are there specific strategies or ideas you’ve leaned into as you’ve gotten older?
Back then there were these ingredients: fingerstyle, blues, swing, heavy rock, no wave. I didn’t know how to do them together fluidly, and as the years have gone along, I just don’t think of genre in the same way. It’s more of a technical thing now—there’s fingerstyle, and then there’s playing with a pick. Part of my technical development has been to get those things to be very fluid. I want to get the same tone with my fingers as I do with a pick; I want it to be unnoticeable when I go between one or the other, or if I’m hybrid picking. As I’ve played my own music and have played with more people, those different ingredients have become more congealed—they’re a world I inhabit, and I pull what I want, when I want.
There’s been a good amount of time between your own solo albums. You had the split with Sir Richard Bishop, Ivory Tower (2016), where you have your own songs. And then there’s New Spells (2021) and The Circular Train (2024). Throughout all this time you’ve had numerous collaborative albums. How do you decide when it’s time to write songs for a solo LP?
I would say that playing solo is my main thing now, but that’s only been in the past five years. I also have a new solo record coming out this spring called Alive Alone, Alive Together (2026). But for a lot of years, I wasn’t thinking about it so much. I was thinking about writing for my band, Unnatural Ways, and also writing for this quartet I had with Devra Hoff, Ches Smith, and James Brandon Lewis. So I was focusing on bands for a while, and solo was something I did when I got called to do it. From playing solo more and more, I just realized how much I enjoyed it on so many levels. It used to be that I’d do a two-week solo tour and really miss playing with other people. And while I still really value playing with other musicians, I don’t miss it when I play solo now. I have enough stimulation from what I do on guitar and electronics that there’s new exciting things for me on any given night.
I didn’t even know you had a new album coming out. How does that compare with the older works?
It’s four solo tracks and then four tracks with Hamid Drake—it’s the songs I play solo all the time, but with Hamid playing on them. That’ll come out in May on Burning Ambulance. About half the tracks on New Spells involved having other people write songs for me. I did that because I liked these people’s writing—Devra Hoff, Trevor Dunn, and John Dikeman. I thought their writing would suit how I’d play solo. I also love interpretation, and I didn’t think of it this way at the time, but this was also a way to find myself. It’s the same way that interpreting standards can be a way to find your own vocabulary without writing music. Also, some technical things have gotten better with these last three records. My time has gotten more solid, for example. And then New Spells is all instrumental, but I sing on a few tracks on The Circular Train, and I also sing on the new one. Playing with Hamid is really cool. He’s such a great drummer and he’s being as interactive as possible, so even though we’re playing my songs, I’m still being open and spontaneous with him.
What does it mean to be as interactive as possible? Is it about posture and mentality? Is it about being a good listener? Is it about being deferential?
I’ll talk about this in relation to Hamid because I think it’s different with everybody. Hamid is a great listener and he has great phrasing. I’ll be playing these lines that are previously composed, but I can alter the timing of the phrasing to communicate with him, and something it’s as basic and as nuts-and-bolts as “we’re gonna hit three quarter notes at the same time here,” or “we’re gonna go really fast and then go (makes explosive sound).” I’m having open ears for where he’s going with his phrasing so it’s not just him accompanying me. He really frees me up when I play with him; I’ll play in a more lead guitar fashion.
I have all these electronics and, when I play solo, I’ll normally play a song, I’ll hit a freeze pedal, and then I’ll loop something. I go between tunings all the time from one song to the next, but with Hamid, he’ll play all this great shit with the loop during the time I’m tuning. And then I’ll come back and improvise with him over the loop, and that’s something that I never really did solo. One of the tracks on the new record came out of that.
I wanted to ask about your singing. What do you think singing has taught you about yourself?
I was definitely way more about guitar than singing growing up. I did sing, and I was in choir for a couple years when I was little, but I never really worked on it until my 20s. I’m a guitarist first and a singer second, and the singing in solo work came out of writing lyrics and wanting someone to sing them. The first thing I’d say that singing has taught me is just… breathing. I’ve relearned breathing, in a way. I just pay so much more attention to my breathing now, and I’m mindful if I’m breathing shallowly and stressing myself out. Like, okay, it’s time to take a deep breath. And I notice it in other people, too. When I talk to people on the phone, especially, I can hear how deep or shallow their breathing is and if there’s tension in their voice or if they’re relaxed. I pay a lot more attention to the diaphragm than when I used to.
Does that shape the music itself and how you write it?
That’s a good question. I tend to be a less-is-more singer. I don’t like to cram all the words in there; I’d rather have too few than too many. Part of that is physical—when I’m playing guitar, there’s only so much I can do in terms of breathing and coordination. In terms of writing, I try to make sure that I have time to breathe, that I have more space.
Can you tell me about Mendoza Hoff Revels? What’s it like playing in that band? And can you talk to me about your relationship with Devra?
We’ve known each other for 20 years, and that was back in our Oakland days. Devra was in The Nels Cline Singers at the time, and I would play solo, opening for them. A couple of bands I was in opened for them, too. We hit it off right away. We had a trio with Weasel Walter called Quok. That’s when I played, for lack of a better word, fusion. Me and Devra’s ears were really compatible, both with the stuff we wrote and the stuff that we improvised. Then all three of us moved away from the Bay Area and didn’t play together for at least 6 years, and then me and Devra both landed in Brooklyn. We were already friends, but when the pandemic hit, we started talking on the phone and thought that we should form a band to specifically play stuff like this—this modern jazz-informed take on instrumental Black Flag. I was really obsessing over The Decoding Society and listening to those records all the time, too, so we decided to make a band that used that as a springboard. Ches and James were the first people we thought to do that with, and they’re great. This was all through the pandemic—we wrote the music, we did socially distanced rehearsals, and then it was partly while we were coming out of it too. Because everyone’s schedules are so busy, I think we only played five gigs—maybe less than that. So, we’re not a very ambitious band in terms of touring and gigging, but I was really happy with that record [Echolocation (2023)].
You said you had really good chemistry with Devra. Are there specific qualities that you notice come with all the people you gel with?
I remember after one of the first Quok rehearsals, Devra said, “I can’t tell if you have really fast ears, or if we just think the same harmonically.” And I couldn’t tell either, like, “Do we just have the same taste in terms of what chord we’re gonna shift to?” And that’s chemistry right there, like, “Did you do that? Did I do that? Was that a decision? Did I just adapt to you really quickly?” That band was really fun. We’re all very different, and in terms of the rhythm section, Devra is a pocket player, she’s a groove player, and she’s great at that. Weasel is absolutely not that—he’s a lead drummer. So it was an interesting rhythm section where Devra is committed to holding it down while me and Weasel are going off. At some point, me and Devra basically became family, and some of it’s from actually playing together. We both love to mess with time—that’s a big part of it. And it’s like that with Hamid, too. This love for playing with all the time, with time in the most expansive sense.
Do you have any specific goals in mind with your upcoming tour?
I have this dream where this is going to be the best rehearsed solo tour I’ve ever done (laughter). I’m at home for three weeks leading up to it, so it’s like I’m at boot camp. So that’s one goal. Also, I wrote a bunch of new music that’s in different stages of being finished. Some of it is in Spanish, and that’s the first time I’ve done that. Using lyrics in both English and Spanish is something I’ve wanted to do for a while, and with ICE and everything going on right now, I really want to do it now. Getting that together and making it really solid is my other goal.
Spanish is my second language, so I’m less good at it. There’s one song I’m doing that has lyrics that were originally written in English and that was then translated to Spanish, but it’s sort of slightly wrong on purpose to mess with this idea of how well languages can actually reproduce each other. And then I’m singing a cover of a song by Violeta Parra, “Gracias a la vida.” I was working on this song last year when I was living with an ex, and they were like, “Your voice sounds different when you sing in Spanish. It’s open in this different way.” It’s one of those things I can hear and recognize now, and while I can’t really control it yet, I’m really leaning into it.
There’s a question I end all my interviews with that I wanted to ask you. Do you mind sharing one thing you love about yourself?
I’m sure that I’m a good judge of character. I think I always had that, and I think a lot of people who tour all the time develop this because you’re meeting people in foreign places and you need to size things up right away. When you’re dealing with so many new people, you have to gauge if what they’re saying is correct and if they’re trustworthy, if they’re someone you can rely on.
Has that come into play recently?
It comes into play with collaborators. I’m slow to choose them now; I’ll wait and see what I can learn about somebody before anything happens. And because of that, I feel really fortunate about the people I end up collaborating with. Like Hamid—he’s one of the greatest people ever.
Ava Mendoza’s music can be found at her Bandcamp. More information about Mendoza can be found at her website. Mendoza is playing shows in the US and Europe throughout March, April, and May. Dates can be found here.
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