Rupa & the April Fishes bring worlds of experience to the stage
 THE NAME IS RUPA Rupa Marya is ready to take on Santa Cruz. Rupa Marya meets me on her home turf, the Revolution Café in San Francisco’s Mission district. The guitarist, singer, songwriter, and hospital doctor carries an eclectic air with her at all times. She orders her coffee in fluent Spanish. She sings many of her songs in flawless French, having grown up partly in France. She crafts songs that bridge the rich, spiced gap between Continental gypsy jazz and Subcontinental Indian tonalities. And the first thing we speak about is a charity mission her band, a fluid lineup of incredible jazz musicians known as The April Fishes, made to a waystation for deportees just over the southern border. “We had 400 shoes strapped to the top of the car that we brought down to them,” she says. “We didn’t know it was illegal to cross the border with donations, but we didn’t feel like we had anything to declare. Oh well.” The shoes were donated to deportees, some of whom had grown up in the United States and been ‘caught’ doing random everyday activities, like skiing or laundry. Now adults, with their families still in the States, the men use the compound as a way to get their bearings and figure out what to do next. “The band stayed in the same accommodations as the men,” Rupa says. “In bunk beds, eight to a room. We played in the courtyard. It’s very rare to get 90 men anywhere in the world to listen to you without drinking alcohol or picking up on somebody, but they were all just seated at first and listening, and by the end of the night it was a party.” The music of the April Fishes has that effect on people. A mélange of all the different cultural influences in Rupa’s life, with instrumentation that includes trumpet, cello, and accordion, the songs rollick and sway with the redolence of an impromptu street concert under starlight. Or build your own imagery. It’s something intentionally woven into the music. “I studied theater as an undergrad,” Rupa says, “and I feel that my work directing has come into this band a lot. The way that I talk about music with the band is very visual and story oriented. We were playing in France, near Nice, and we were on this balcony overlooking the water, and I said, ‘You see the way the moonlight is hitting the water? That’s what I envision for the middle part of this song.’ That process is what lends some of the theatricality to our music, even though we’re not wearing crazy costumes or anything.” As we talk about the trend in independent music toward multilingualism—how nearly every band that captures cross-genre attention seems to sing in four or five languages in any given set—she surprises me with a look into her songwriting process. “Right now I’m obsessed with the image of an artichoke. What is this artichoke thing? I’m reading Naruda right now and he has a poem with an image of an artichoke. My friend Mona is painting a mural of an artichoke right now. Maybe it’s a love story. Definitely in English. I don’t know. It usually starts like this, with discomfort in my stomach. When I get it right, it feels like relief.” If she sounds as if she’s describing appendicitis symptoms, that’s no accident. While Rupa is an artist and musician extraordinaire six months of the year, the other half she’s an attending physician at General Hospital, having just finished her residency with UC San Francisco. Many of her songs are inspired by her “other” job, and the incredible people she comes across in the day-to-day business of saving lives. This unusual double-life, normally reserved for superheroes, was due to a flexible set-up extended by UCSF, to do two-month stints at each through her final year of study. “It was the most productive time in my life,” she says. “For the first time I didn’t feel like I had to choose. Everyone’s always asked, are you a doctor or a musician? Make up your mind. But I couldn’t choose, and I always thought there was something wrong with me. When I got the permission to do both from UCSF, it made both pursuits all the more powerful.” The hospital work is also what got her interest up in making trips like Operation: Shoe. “The neighborhood where I spend most of my time,” she says, gesturing to the busy and colorful street behind her, “a lot of people are immigrants, and also where I work. I’m very aware of immigration issues—my parents immigrated from India. So there was one particular woman who was 53, and found lumps in her breasts eight months prior to coming to the hospital. When I met her, the cancer was already everywhere. I asked her why she waited eight months when she had felt something in her breast, and she said, ‘I was so afraid of being deported.’ To me, the idea of that physical reality, being so alienated from one’s body because of this fear, it made me want to learn more about the border and talk to people about the human effects of how this invisible line can cause such deep and profound effects on people’s lives.” The border-blending music of the April Fishes is instantly recognizable as more than a gimmick, then. It’s felt deeply, at the level of creation. “That’s how the stories want to be told,” Rupa says of her ideas. “You can see the identity embedded in a global context. Not just English or American, but who have I been my entire life? Who have I come into contact with who has influenced who I understand myself to be? If you look at the world, that’s become a more and more common story, people leaving a singular cultural experience for something that is much more layered. And going in and out of time. Not just ultra-modern but calling back to something very old.” She concludes, “There’s something particular in the culture right now that wants to find a global context for who we are. What is common that is beyond language?” Rupa & the April Fishes will open for Dengue Fever on Saturday, Nov. 10, at the Kuumbwa Jazz Center, 320-2 Cedar St., Santa Cruz. Tickets are $17 in advance, $20 at the door, and are available at kuumbwajazz.org or Streetlight Records and Logos Books. For more information, visit theaprilfishes.com .
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