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Based in the San
Francisco Bay Area, Rupa & the
April Fishes create music that
defies easy categorization.
Their debut album, "eXtraOrdinary
rendition," echoes with
influences of French chanson,
Argentinean tango, Gypsy swing,
American folk, Latin cumbias,
and even Indian ragas. Their
raucous and inviting
performances have earned them a
wide following in San Francisco,
and they are poised for
international recognition with the
worldwide release of "eXtraOrdinary
rendition."
Rupa & the April
Fishes is led by a young woman
of Indian heritage whose nomadic
upbringing and dual life as a
musician and doctor has led her
to explore issues of identity,
borders, and the vagaries of
life, love and death. Rupa's
mother and father were
originally from the Punjab
region of northern India. They
moved to the United States in
the early 1970s, settling in the
Bay Area, where Rupa was born.
When Rupa was four years old,
her parents were struggling
financially and sent her and her
older brother back to India to
live with Rupa's grandparents
until they could get their feet
back on the ground. Even though
she looked like everyone else in
her Indian elementary school,
for the first time, Rupa was
aware that her American
upbringing and lack of facility
with the Hindi language made her
very different from her
classmates. It was the first of
many moments in her life when
Rupa began thinking about issues
of race and identity.
Rupa's
parents fell in love with
southern France and moved to
Aix-En-Provence when Rupa was
ten years old. One of the few
people of Indian descent in an
area with a large Arab immigrant
population, Rupa was immediately
aware that the color of her skin
led people to make judgments
about her before she even opened
her mouth. "I remember going
into town with one of the ladies
from my school" recalls Rupa,
"and she said, 'Don't worry, I'm
going to introduce you as Indian
… otherwise they're going to
think you're an Arab,' as if
that was a horrible thing. I
remember being ten years old and
always very aware of race and
how people perceived me, and how
I perceived myself. Living in
the south of France, people
always assumed that I was either
Roma (Gypsy), or Arab. And so I
was always very aware of how
people treated my shade of
brown, and how I was developing
my own concept of identity."
While Rupa began playing music
when she was eight years old,
she was also naturally adept at
science. "When I was in second
grade, my teacher asked me what
I wanted to be when I grew up,
and I said 'A surgeon and a
ballerina.' Growing up, I always
struggled with trying to figure
out what I was supposed to do,
music or medicine." She decided
to pursue a career in medicine
at the University of California
at San Francisco, while
simultaneously playing music
with friends in local clubs and
cafes. Now a physician and
teacher of medicine working in a
hospital in San Francisco, Rupa
has worked out a unique
arrangement that allows her to
divide her time between her
passion for music and the
creative arts with being a
doctor.
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While she first started
by playing straightforward
singer-songwriter material in
English, Rupa was beginning to
forge a new sound that was more
representative of her complex
identity, which she describes as
a "mosaic". Rupa began writing
in French, which she
saw as "a way to separate myself
melodically and rhythmically
from the literal meaning of
language. I wanted to learn to
use
language as paint strokes,
instead of actual literal words
all the time. So I said to
myself, 'what if I wrote in
French as a way to explore
music through the sound of the
words, and the melody inherent
in the language. And see how
that changes my writing.' And it
ended up allowing for a lot more
immediate connection to the
emotional intensity of what I
was trying to convey. It was
music that
was trying to explore what it
meant to me to be who I was
growing up in all these
different places with all these
amazing stories and
this family who dragged me all
over the world. It's trying to
give voice to those beautiful
things that came through my
heritage."
Rupa began playing solo in cafes
until she joined up with cellist
Ed Baskerville to form a duet.
They played on the streets, in
streetcars, art galleries, and
other informal settings, "just
as a way of getting myself
comfortable with the street
nature of the music I
was writing, and how I wanted to
communicate to people. My goal
was even though I was writing in
French I wanted people to
understand it and to feel it.
And that was sort of the
surprise of this music, how
accessible it was to people."
Eventually, the band grew to
include a rotating roster of
some of the Bay Area's most
talented young musicians. The
name the April
Fishes was inspired by the
French term les poissons d'avril,
which is related to the English
term April Fools. In France on
the first of
April, people stick little paper
fishes on unsuspecting people's
backs. "The origin of that is
disputed", Rupa explains, "but
one of
the stories is that when a
French king changed to the Roman
calendar from the pagan calendar
that was in wide use at the time
some people who still wanted to
celebrate the New Year in April.
So these are the people who
would give the fishes, the April
fish, to
celebrate the beginning of the
New Year. We were feeling like
April fishes-- people who don't
believe the reality that's
handed to
them by some higher order,
people who continue to insist on
their own reality. It's a
political and social
commentary."
Eventually, the band's following
grew, and they moved from
playing small settings to
performing in front of sell-out
crowds at some
of San Francisco's most popular
concert venues. Their concerts
have earned renown for their
circus-like atmosphere at times
featuring stilt-walkers, live
painting and performance artists
that channels a modern-day
Moulin Rouge.
With its polyglot influences,
the music of Rupa & the April
Fishes reflects Rupa's interest
in the arbitrary nature of
borders and how
they artificially create
differences and divisions
between people who are at core
the same. The result reflects
her hope for the future,
a world with dissolving borders,
where the essential humanness of
any person or group can be heard
or seen before labels and
dividing lines are drawn. Rupa's
music is a pastiche of sounds
and impressions--undeniably full
of heart--with subject matters
ranging from love and loss in a
time of uncertainty to stories
of people in transition.
Listen to Rupa & the April Fishes
Rupa & the April Fishes
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