Learning Along the Way

Finding community in Boston can be difficult. Music is how this singer-songwriter knows how to hold space for her audience, her students and herself.

Written by Kai Lun Dingcong, Photographed by Marygrace Gladden

On a partly cloudy afternoon in a backyard in Jamaica Plain, a Boston neighborhood, musicians gathered in a loose circle, the masks covering the singers’ faces doing little to hinder their effortless harmonization. The temperature peaked at 58 degrees that Sunday, Oct. 18, but still they had come out to celebrate one of their own — a young woman with long, wavy black hair styled over one shoulder, her smile hidden behind her mask but her eye-roll plainly visible. The camera panned from one face to another before landing on her, the star of the party: Ava Sophia Dudani, 27 years old that day.

I watched the videos on Ava’s Instagram story, one after another capturing the party from every angle, each tagged @avasophiamusic and filled with the unabashed joy of a jam session among friends. At some point, the camera zoomed in on Steve “Barefoot” Chandy, a guitar slung across his lap and his mask billowing with the force of his song.

“I’m gonna make it! Oh, whoa-ohh! Out of my bed,” he sang, the rest of the circle joining in with the rousing chorus. The last time I heard him perform that song was as a guest artist for Ava’s youth showcase in December 2019, an event she had organized as the music director of the Boys & Girls Club of Greater Lowell.

The show was, in a way, Ava’s good-bye to the children who sang, rapped and hyped each other up under the fuchsia stage lights of that tiny café, one last effort to give them the spotlight before she moved onto a job closer to home.

Ava Dudani, Ava Sophia on stage and in her songwriting credits, hails from Boston, specifically Brighton, and specifically the part of Brighton with a 17-year-old independent coffee shop and a deli that’s been around since 1991. She drove me through the neighborhood once and told me of her childhood home nearby, the walls lined with abstract abstract acrylic paintings produced by her mother, Lynn Rosa-Dudani.

“Going back and forth from my mom and my dad’s house, when I was with my mom, that’s when I felt like I was the most grounded,” she told me. “I felt like I was home.”

As a multicultural child whose parents had been separated as long as she could remember, home is a topic that comes up often for Ava. Her father Surrendra Dudani immigrated from Mumbai to obtain his Ph.D. from Syracuse University, adding the layer of diasporic identity to the already complicated idea of home.

“A lot of the time, when I couldn’t really find something to identify with, I could feel really, really grounded in my neighborhood,” said Ava, “I could say, ‘I’m from Boston, I grew up here, I’m proud to have grown up here.’ So I think I became really attached to that identity marker because it was hard for me to find one that made sense to other people.”

Ava’s music — rooted mainly in rhythm and blues, with influences from singersongwriters like Sara Bareilles and Ingrid Michaelson — deals heavily with the navigation of identity and intimacy. Her debut EP “To See and Hear Hxrself,” released in October 2019, holds space for dichotomies as varied as racial identity, attitudes towards love, and the coming-of-age tension between self-doubt and self-confidence that characterizes so many people in their 20s.

Her most recent single “Love Language” is a collaboration with rapper Tashawn Taylor, produced for 617Sessions’s “Sound of Our Town 2020” album. The song resulted in nominations for Ava in two categories of the 2020 Boston Music Awards: 617Sessions Artist of the Year and, to her surprise, R&B Artist of the Year.

“It’s been such a long-time goal to get nominated,” said Ava, whose love language is words of affirmation, a trait we both share.

Though the awards went to Red Shaydez and Miranda Rae respectively, Ava expressed that it was more unusual to compete with other artists in the Boston scene than collaborate.

“A lot of us have worked together and a lot of us have supported each other,” she said, “My approach is just to appreciate when I get love and keep it moving when I don’t.”

The Boston Music Awards was her “gateway into the local industry” after her return from Los Angeles in 2017, where she had lived post-graduation from Berklee College of Music. To get back into the Boston scene, she looked up the BMAs nominees and discovered names like Oompa, Marcela Cruz and Mint Green.

As children of immigrants, Ava and I have had many conversations about what it’s like to exist in the hyphen between descriptors like ‘Asian-American’ and ‘first-generation.’

From personal experience, I can confirm how difficult it is to access the oftentimes insular social spaces in Boston, but Ava has great pride for the communities that do exist, ones that she has helped cultivate.

“Even though Boston is such a difficult city to navigate sometimes, and you really, really have to look to find the right community if you’re a queer person, or a person of color, or both of those things. The community seems to care as much as I do about that representation being visible,” she said, speaking not only about the city’s music scene but also the Boston chapter of Subcontinental Drift, the South Asian open mic night that was the first place she sought out after her homecoming return.

It was there that she met Payal Kumar — artist, activist, SubDrift board member and my former housemate — who introduced the two of us during a grocery run to Haymarket. Ava was waiting for Payal and me at the Coolidge Corner T stop on a balmy mid-September day; hours later, I returned with several pounds of lychee and a friendship that would give rise to early morning runs, fruit smoothies for breakfast, and casual trips to Trader Joe’s for mulled cider ingredients. But even more than that, some of the most inspirational people I know would come into my life because of Ava and Payal, who are more actively invested in creating community than most folks I’d met before.

“People don’t realize that to be part of the cultural zeitgeist, what that actually looks like is being part of these local communities and creating culture,” said Ava. “Sometimes where there isn’t any, and sometimes out of desperation or out of bad circumstances.” She acted on this newfound truth when she first stepped into her role as an organizer in 2018, curating a show of all South Asian performers in what would later become the Dusky Peril Arts Initiative.

“I wanted to create a space where my dreams could be visible and possible, and I didn’t want to leave my city to find that space,” she said in her introduction of “The Art of Accountability” workshop on Nov. 14, 2020, an event held over Zoom that featured local artists Eva Davenport, Noemi Saafyr Paz and Hassan Ghanny.

“There needs to be more of a conversation about what the South Asian narrative looks like in the United States, and what it looks like to be a diaspora kid,” said Ava. “And that includes: what does it mean to be a South Asian artist? What does it mean to be marginalized within the South Asian community, to be caste-oppressed, to be multiracial, to be an adoptee, to be Indo-Caribbean?”

Alongside the responsibility of creating a space for greater representation, Ava admitted that she feels “a bit of impostor syndrome about speaking for an entire community.”

However, she’s tackling the work ahead of her with the same mindset as her Berklee professor, Annette Philip, who founded the Berklee Indian Ensemble.

Ava never shies away from dualities in her work, which illustrates as much uncertainty and friction as it does reconciliation and celebration.

“You can learn along the way, and you can always learn more,” said Ava, paraphrasing Philip, “I have to be a little bit more grounded in the fact that I am the right person to do this.”

Ava stressed the importance of bringing in diverse voices, one of her first moves after rebranding Dusky Peril was to host a community strategy meeting, where she would meet her future co-leader Aswini Melekote. She stands firm in the belief that her individual South Asian experience doesn’t make her any less qualified to take on the tasks ahead of her.

After all, growing up at the intersection of two cultures, she’s had plenty of practice listening to different perspectives in order to shape her own understanding of the world. “Both sides of my racial identity were very polarized, so I didn’t grow up seeing my mom’s family and my dad’s family interact,” she said, describing a disconnected game of intergenerational telephone in which she would hear her mother’s stories about her father’s family and vice versa.

“Both had very, very different points of view, and a lot of my experience growing up was making sense of everybody’s perspectives.”

Ava never questioned the fact that her parents lived in separate houses until outside opinions challenged the norm of her everyday reality.

“It was always weird to me as a kid that the expectation was your parents look the same,” she said, denouncing the significance that society places on genealogy and racial categorizations.

“People have been mixing throughout history. There’s no such thing as racial purity; there’s no reason to look at me and feel like I’m this weird person because society is trying to make me feel that way,” she said, an opinion that enables her to put away the common biracial narrative of “not being able to pick a side.”

As children of immigrants, Ava and I have had many conversations about what it’s like to exist in the hyphen between descriptors like “Asian-American” and “first-generation.” For Ava, this cultural tension becomes apparent in the album “To See and Hear Hxrself,” a collection of four tracks that layer joy, anxiety, contemplation and desire. Be it desire for intimacy, community or answers, Ava addresses that from different angles in each track.

The connective tissue of the album is the audio clips that serve as short skits between songs, snippets of conversation with her aunt, Sheela Gursahani.

“What kinds of things do you get anxious about?” Ava asked in the clip following “Can’t Love You,” a heavy confession that knows the gravity of its titular lyrics, unfolding almost mournfully in its slowness.

“Everything,” said Gursahani, “but I was very sensitive. You can’t do anything if you’re sensitive.”

Gursahani’s advice on toughness and anxiety strikes a clear contrast with the emotional vulnerability of Ava’s lyrics, especially in the gentle revelations of “Love Is Love,” which has become something of an anthem among her fans.

“Learning to live/Learning to grow,” she sang in the opening verse. “Give all you have to give/And let your worst parts show.”

The generational dichotomy is clear, but the skits are just as much a part of the album as the songs themselves.

Ava never shies away from dualities in her work, which illustrates as much uncertainty and friction as it does reconciliation and celebration.

“My goal in making that was to empower people listening, and especially empowering people who identify as femme, to give themselves the space to listen to their own selves on their own terms,” she said of the album, which is spelled with an X in “Hxrself” to include femmes of variant gender identities.

“Sometimes I feel like we can’t even hear what we’re thinking, or we can’t even feel what we’re feeling because there’s so much in the way,” she continued, “Especially if you live in a society where everyone is constantly telling you how you should feel about yourself or what you should think about yourself.”

“Ava Sophia Wisdom,” I replied, riffing off her Instagram handle in what has become a long-standing joke among friends. I could hear her eye roll on the other end of the line.

“You know, I’m just trying to figure it all out.”

“You could say you’re … ‘Searching,’” I said, referencing the first track of her EP, and then the third not long after, “You’re … ‘Restless.’”

“Oh my God.”

“And … ‘Imperfect,’” I laughed, pulling out the title of an unreleased song that I’ve had the privilege of hearing at shows like “Community Over Consumption,” a potluck/performance/ open mic hosted by Ava in November 2019 with fellow musician Anaís Azul.

The event was just one of many shows that Ava has organized in collaboration with other Boston artists, including “An R&B Femme Takeover” with Eva Davenport, Marcela Cruz and Miranda Rae and “Color Theory: A Multiracial Lyric” with Hassan Ghanny, described as “a narrative that draws the listener closer to the experience of being a multiracial person in America.”

When it comes to balancing performances with teaching, Ava said that music and education are interrelated in accomplishing her goals. Whether as a performer, organizer or classroom instructor, music has always been “that vehicle for me to make that impact on my community, or on the world, that I’ve always wanted to make.”

Currently she works at the Boston Chinatown Neighborhood Center as an Art Specialist, a position that originally involved teaching music classes in an after-school care program, but since March, the BCNC has experimented with a

variety of in-person and online instruction plans. Weathering the pandemic with her students, she says, has been one of the most significant experiences of her teaching career, but prior to COVID-19, one memorable batch of students stands out: a group of girls in their early teens who attended her weekly singing class at the Charlestown Boys & Girls Club.

“I think working with that group of girls in particular really gave me the kind of vocabulary to say, ‘This is why working with girls of color matters to me,’” said Ava, recalling one girl who was both especially talented and incredibly shy. “I ended up being really, really lucky to have the opportunity to coach her through the audition process for my high school.”

The Boston Arts Academy is the city’s only public high school for the visual and performing arts. After some encouragement and guidance, Ava’s student passed auditions and enrolled with the Academy, a fact that Ava stated with pride.

“You can’t be successful with every group of kids, but I feel lucky to have been successful with them,” she said. “There were times that I saw them cry, I saw them … be scared to sing in front of each other, but it was real trust building. I was lucky to have really gained their trust and built community with them.”

There were times that I saw them cry, I saw them … be scared to sing in front of each other, but it was real trust building. I was lucky to have really gained their trust and built community with them.

The artist development process, she says it’s her favorite part about working with kids, where she can help them build confidence and discover music as an outlet for self-expression.

“Music has always been that for me. It’s been the place where I feel like I can express myself in the most honest way, and just sit with who I am, how I feel, and what I believe. And I think everyone needs an outlet like that,” she said, thinking of her students. “I really hope music can be that for them, and if it’s not, then I hope they can find that. They can find whatever it is that allows them to have that voice.”