Music
Edited by Brent DiCrescenzo
KICK MOI The April Fishes took
their name from France’s version
of April Fool’s Day, when paper
cutouts of fishes are placed on
unsuspecting people’s backs.
The doctor is in
A cosmopolitan physician
turns travel and travail into
tunes. By Craig Keller
Crossing musical and cultural borders
is part and parcel of Chicago’s World
Music Festival. But for singer-
guitarist Rupa of San Francisco’s
genre-blurring Rupa and the April
Fishes—who cast their slippery
French-chanson, Gypsy-jazz and
Indian-raga hooks and scales at three
fest gigs on Friday 19 and Saturday
20—there’s no need to cross anything.
As an Indian-American woman, born
to Punjabi parents, who grew up in the
Bay Area, India and Aix-en-Provence
in southern France; sings in French,
English, Hindi, Romany and Spanish;
and splits her time between leading
one of the hottest emerging acts on the
world-music circuit and practicing as a
physician at University of California–
San Francisco, the thirtysomething
Rupa is a borderless NGO unto herself.
Which doesn’t mean she’s immune to
those who insist on boundaries.
Sketching out ideas at a Paris café while
on vacation a few years ago, Rupa was
approached by an Algerian man after
photo: Judith Burrows
he learned she was American.
“He said, ‘Aren’t you afraid to be
here with all the angry Arabs who hate
your country?’ It was a very interesting
moment in my life. I’d never had
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someone immediately put up a wall like
that because of a bigger political
problem,” says Rupa, long accustomed
to having her looks treated as a
cultural-identity Rorschach test.
“When I was a girl in Provence, people
thought I was Arab. In Italy, I’m
Brazilian. In California, I’m Mexican.”
The encounter inspired “Une
Americaine à Paris,” a galloping bal-
musette–inspired song on her band’s
debut full-length, eXtraOrdinary
rendition (Cumbancha, 2008). An
acoustic retro-pop amuse-bouche, the
album begins with a fog horn recorded
at dawn over the San Francisco Bay. It
crescendos from hushed lullaby wisps
to hot jazz- and tango-tinged cabaret
stomps. In a fragile soprano that
sounds like Edith Piaf filtered through
Keren Ann, Rupa sings, “Je ne suis pas
américaine, tu n’es pas arabe, et nous
ne sommes pas à Paris, nous sommes
dans la vie”: I’m not an American,
you’re not an Arab, and we’re not in
Paris, we’re in life.
The album’s tales of love and
disconnect muse on the nature of
borders both national and personal,
man-made and spiritual. The
heartbreaking lyrics to “Wishful
Thinking,” a wistful maritime waltz in
which a couple parts ways when one
sets sail to unknown lands, were
inspired by an elderly patient Rupa
treated, who bid his wife of 40 years
goodbye as he lay dying. Mariachi-
flavored “Poder” was written after the
band visited Tijuana to perform a
benefit concert on behalf of
immigration rights; the song tallies
what can cross the border freely: fish,
the wind, TVs, money, a song—
everything but human beings.
“In Provence, I was
Arab. In California,
I’m Mexican.”
“I don’t want to take a
sledgehammer and beat people over
the head with a big political
statement,” says Rupa, who planted
the roots for her global agit-pop as a
moonlighting folk singer-songwriter
while studying for her degree in
internal medicine. Torn over which
career to pursue, Rupa decided both
were essential in the wake of two life-
altering events that nearly coincided:
the death of her father and September
11. “I’d been torturing myself,” she
recalls. “Am I a doctor or a musician? I
am both of these things. It’s important
for me to express what I love about this
world, this country and the humanity I
encounter at the hospital, where you
can treat a CEO, a migrant farm
September 18–24, 2008  Time Out Chicago 83
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worker and a prostitute all in one day.”
Reflecting her cosmopolitan roots,
Rupa started writing tunes not in
English and recruited bandmates from
San Francisco’s Mission District,
where a rich scene devoted to
resurrecting vintage musical forms has
arisen in recent years. The ethnically
diverse quintet—guitar, double bass,
cello, accordion and trumpet—often
includes multimedia elements such as
live mural painting and stilt dancers.
Music
Unfortunately, it’s an indulgence too
costly for the current international tour
of the U.S., Canada and Germany.
After the tour, the band plans to
record 15 new songs in Spanish and
English—many related to its frequent
trips to the U.S.–Mexico border—but
it’ll have to work around Rupa’s two-
month shifts at the hospital. “The
intensity of both jobs makes it
difficult, but I feel blessed to carve this
path,” Rupa says. “You’re walking
between life and death all the time, and
you learn to understand the true value
of time and being with each other. You
get to know people at important,
intimate times in their lives, and when
it affects you deeply, it’s nice to have
another place to put it.”
Rupa and the April Fishes perform at
the University of Chicago Friday 19
and Navy Pier and Old Town School of
Folk Music Saturday 20. See Listings.