Ava Mendoza

Perhaps the best way to describe guitarist, vocalist, composer Ava Mendoza's music is to double underscore the word "guitarist" and emphatically point at it because that pretty much tells the core story. She is a ferocious instrumentalist who fluidly shifts between full-on avant-garde jazz and a combination of blues influenced progressive metal and fusion, often shredding the daylight out of her guitar. Between her hard edges of distortion and improvisational dissonance, she continually explores sound and texture, and mixes musical idioms and styles. Her 2025 album Circular Train finds her as a solo performer, alone on her guitar covering a particular American folk landscape that stretches between the western sound and southern blues, with no accompaniment other than her confident, commanding vocals on a couple of tracks.