$15 at the door 7:00pm Show
The fourth and final evening of bassist Liz Draper’s Sunday night residency at Berlin features a very special guest: Brooklyn-based guitar wizard Ava Mendoza. Look forward to solo sets by Mendoza and Draper. Some cross pollination to follow.
Bassist Liz Draper has played with everyone from Sub Pop's Grammy-nominated slowcore band Low to the Balkan folk group Orkestar Bez Ime, Righteous Babe artist Pieta Brown, Grammy Award-winning Okee Dokee Brothers, and Smithsonian recording artist folk troubadour Charlie Parr. Liz grew up playing jazz and has a degree in classical bass performance. Her improvising led her to Brooklyn's SIM (School for Improvised Music 2003). Liz is a 2019 Giant Steps Fellow (San Francisco). She is a 2021 American Composers Forum awardee for her solo work which can be described as "classicaldoomfolkjazz." Liz is currently touring with two-time Grammy-nominated songwriter Iris Dement.
Ava Mendoza is a Brooklyn-based guitarist, composer, and songwriter. They are best known for their solo guitar/voice performances and as the leader or co-leader of projects including Mendoza ★ Hoff ★ Revels, Third Landing, AM/FM (with violinist gabby fluke-mogul), and Unnatural Ways. They regularly collaborate and work as a supporting performer with various artists and groups, and they are committed to bringing expressivity, energy, and a wide sonic range to the music they perform.
Mendoza has toured throughout the Americas and Europe, performing and recording with a range of musicians, including Malcolm Mooney (CAN), Abiodun Oyewole (Last Poets), Matana Roberts, Jamaaladeen Tacuma, Fred Frith, Bran(....)pos, Negativland, the Violent Femmes, and members of Caroliner. As a composer, they have received commissions from Jazz Coalition, the New Music Creator Development Fund, John Zorn’s Stone Commissioning Series at National Sawdust, and the film distributor Kino Lorber.
Mendoza has performed at the Le Guess Who? Festival in Utrecht, Netherlands (2023); the Sons D’Hiver Festival in Paris, France (2023); the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, TN; and the MONA FOMA Festival in Tasmania, Australia (2015). They have recorded with the labels AUM Fidelity, Tzadik, Relative Pitch, Astral Spirits, and New Atlantis. They received The Stone NYC Artist Residency (2016 and 2022) in New York, NY, and were named an Eminent Artist in Residence at the MONA FOMA Festival (2015) in Tasmania, Australia. In 2016, Mendoza was featured as a part of Carte Blanche—a curated concert series for international musicians at the Bimhuis in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Mendoza has been a music curator and artist lecturer at Creative Music Studio in New York, NY (2023), a music curator and facilitator at Arts for Art in New York, NY (2023), and a guest music curator at Union Pool in Brooklyn, NY (2023). They received their BA in intermedia art from Mills College in Oakland, CA.
