Artist Profile: Ava Jinying’s Introspective and Monstrous Songwriting

Ava Salzman ’23’s guitar case sits propped open against the wall of Eliot House dorm. Sitting upright is a Rodrigo classical acoustic guitar, suited with a pickup and a black strap with rainbow and white geometry. When Salzman plays here, her legs dangle off the side of her bed and the guitar reverberates around the small room, decorated with handmade open mic signs. Her fingers, most of them hugged by metal rings, pick the strings, or move up and down the fretboard. The harmonics are like bells, her voice emotional and stately.

Salzman, who also goes by the name Ava Jinying in her work as an artist, says her first album, not yet named, will most likely be released in the spring. It deals with monstrosity, turning the abstract and intangible into something with a form. In her song “Snakeskin,” a song about the struggles of transitioning into adulthood, she equates herself to a metal snake. She sings about the cycles of growth, and feeling trapped inside herself, trying to figure out how to change.

This song is not yet recorded. For now, she plays “Snakeskin” and other originals around Harvard’s campus: At the Harvard Signet Society for open mics she hosts with friends, outside at markets, or at Eliot House’s Tiny Desk series. She currently has two songs released on Spotify. One of them, “Guai,” will be a part of this new album.

By Courtesy of Ava Jinying

Salzman is comfortable with the guitar. She started playing when she was six after watching a video of Johnny Cash playing “Long Black Veil.” She liked Cash’s charisma and his powerful presence, and decided she wanted to be just like him.

Her teacher was a blues guy, according to Salzman. He preferred to play by ear rather than just reading music. Lessons started with learning songs she wanted to play, like “I love Rock ‘n’ Roll” by Joan Jett, and of course, “Long Black Veil.” But that changed as she got older.

She describes a shift in her ability when she was around 12. Her uncle introduced her to guitar players known for their complicated and stirring guitar solos, legends like Jimi Hendrix and Jimmy Page from Led Zeppelin.

“Oh my gosh, I have to learn how to play this thing,” she remembers thinking.

In middle school, she played in a punk band, and started writing songs when she was 13, playing open mics at farmers markets.

“Then, it was just pure self expression and it was really fun,” she said. “I think I kind of took it for granted for a while in that I was just doing it constantly, but I didn’t realize how much of a life force it really was until it was one of the only things I had.”

Sometimes, she played the open mics with her dad, a cellist, and her younger sister on vocals; they arranged covers together. With her mom, Salzman went to concerts and smaller shows in her hometown of Los Angeles throughout high school.

“She didn’t play music herself,” Salzman said about her mom. “But she was so passionate about creating spaces for music.”

Salzman remembers having music nights at their house in Los Angeles, when 30 or 40 of their family friends would come over, each with their own instrument, and play music. They flowed between the food room with tables full of chicken and noodles, bok choy, dumplings, and mu shu pork from the Green Dragon — an L.A. favorite — and the music room where people sat in the living room on sofas, or at the step of the fireplace. Performances ranged from a young boy practicing his trumpet routine, to people getting back into music after a long break, to professional singer-songwriters trying out new songs. Nearing the end of the night, they would all join in, singing or playing, for a few songs. Sometimes it was Ah-ha’s “Take On Me,” or “Let Down” by Radiohead, or a campy version of the Beatles “Let it Be.”

During this time of her life, Salzman played music every day. After a long day at school, she did her homework, ate dinner, and used the rest of the evening to play the guitar, to decompress and process.

After getting to Harvard however, that daily dedication wasn’t as much of a priority in the fluster of being a first year. She thought she wanted to study evolutionary biology. She may not have realized differently if the Covid-19 pandemic didn’t send her home nearing the end of her freshman year.

“Up until that point, I think I was a person who really thrived and felt comfortable when I was in environments that I knew,” she said.

But all that went away.

“I was really faced with the concept that when everything else goes to waste, who really, who, who am I?” Salzman said.

Sometime near Thanksgiving, she was sitting at the keyboard in the too small apartment she lived in with six friends and a dog, all doing online school, feeling unstable, aimless, and helpless. The only thing she felt she could do to make sense of it all was write a song.

By Courtesy of Ava Jinying

She picked up the guitar again.

In September of this year, Salzman performed some of her original songs for her fellow house residents in the Eliot library. She wore a white shirt, white jeans, black boots and a chunky necklace as past Harvard presidents looked out at her from their framed homes on the wall.

For two of her three songs, she performed on her own, with her acoustic guitar hanging from a strap around her shoulders. In these songs, she began with a classical intro, and used the melodic notes to highlight her vocals. She’s especially mastered the bridges of her songs, knowing how to build suspense and emotion through change in both her lyrics and her guitar’s rhythm.

She wondered if people were going to get her lyrics, understand the words she put so much time into. After the show, people told her about the journey her songs took them on, and that they felt those tumultuous feelings she sings about.

They got it.

Salzman played with a cellist on “Snakeskin.” Collaborating on her music is something that she has no problem with. She finds in her experience so far that allowing other people's musical talent into her process of creating a song elevates it beyond a point that she could get to by herself.

When she’s looking to collaborate, she writes the music on her own and the arrangements for the other instruments, then asks the people she's asked to work with her to use the arrangement to do whatever they’d like.

During one performance, she played her song “Feel,” accompanied by a friend on the drums. The beat of the song is funky and hard hitting, and shifts slightly during the solo. The drummer made a bigger shift though, into a Bossa Nova beat.

“I would've never thought of that,” she said. “Now, I like it 10 times better than I previously did.”

She finds satisfaction in collaboration. The wall of her dorm’s hallway features a collage of her detailed graphite drawings of rhinos and giraffes, and her roommates' creative creatures with spirally limbs. She enjoys her role as a proctor for the First-year Art program (or FAP) because she gets to witness the beginnings of musical collaborations.

“I did get to drift around and see what friendships people were making over music,” the singer said. “It was such a beautiful thing to see. I love being able to witness people bringing their talents together in different contexts and making something new for people to see.”

In the same way she sees collaboration with other artists elevating a piece of songwriting, she takes special interest in merging her own visual arts with her songwriting as well. For example, the songs she is working on for her album all relate to monstrosity in some way.

“Whenever I was faced with emotions, or situations that felt overwhelming to me and I couldn’t confront them directly I think that my first impulse was always to draw monsters,” she said. “Monsters were on my way growing up, taking something scary because it's intangible and abstract and giving a form to it and by doing that, you somehow make it less scary.”

She sees this sort of coping mechanism as a way of taking care of her emotional state. She still creates monsters through art, and has started writing songs about them.

In “Guai,” Salzman samples an interview from a Vietnamese Buddhist Monk talking about Hungry Ghosts, which represent the spirits of people who have nobody left alive to remember them. She came across this throughout her childhood, celebrating Chinese traditions where families leave out food for their ancestors.

“Once you have been forgotten, then if you have nobody left to feed you, then you become hungry and you become sort of monstrous,” she said. “And I think one thing that I've been thinking about a lot in my art is how to reconcile with painful pasts and things that we can't undo and people that we have erased.”

She creates the art that serves as the covers for her published pieces, and plans on using animations to create videos to go along with them too.

“I'm realizing now, I think that [music] is going to take a much more important role than I had previously thought in my life,” she said. “I just, I love it. Yeah. I love it more than anything else.”