Rupa and the April Fishes

Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, Rupa & the April Fishes create music that defies easy categorization. Their repertoire echoes with influences of French chanson, Argentinean tango, Gypsy swing, American folk, Latin cumbias, and even Indian ragas. 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.

Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, Rupa & the April Fishes create music that defies easy categorization. Their repertoire echoes with influences of French chanson, Argentinean tango, Gypsy swing, American folk, Latin cumbias, and even Indian ragas.

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.

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.

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8/29/10: Rupa and the April Fishes

The San Francisco–based musical agitators blend an alternative pop attitude with international spices, mixing in elements of Gypsy swing, Colombian cumbia, French chanson, and Indian ragas.

Rupa and the April Fishes

The San Francisco–based musical agitators blend an alternative pop attitude with international spices, mixing in elements of Gypsy swing, Colombian cumbia, French chanson, and Indian ragas.

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Rupa and the April Fishes

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