Rupa and The April Fishes: Alternative music band resets tone of the day

It is true that beauty is the pursuit of everyone. Yet confirmation is hardly the way. The ones who toy with the unknown not confirming to the beaten track are the most likely to find it.

Perhaps, that is what warrants Rupa and The April Fishes all the mention. I heard the band at the Outside Lands Festival in San Francisco singing in French to American crowds. It was not the lyrics perhaps but the beauty of identity in the apparently unidentifiable that the listeners responded to.

For long, identities have been confined to borders, regions, race, caste, culture and language; anything beyond that being treated as non-inclusive. Rupa, an Indian by origin, learned this early on when she had to live between India, America and France as a child. She belonged to all the places, yet all of them treated her as foreign. She was shunned by an Algerian in France because she was American. Others thought her a gypsy because of her brown skin. Things reached the hilt in Rupa´s life with the 9/11 attacks in America. In a post- 9/11 America, suspicious of anything foreign, she decided she would write 10 songs about love (not love songs) in a foreign language. "I wanted people to appreciate the beauty in something they didn´t understand," she says. Just when the world was getting much more afraid of differences, she wanted to challenge herself and people by "communicating… in a way that people who don´t speak that language can understand what you´re saying and to see if people could understand the emotion and the truth that was being conveyed under the language I was speaking through the music."

While her lyrics are in French, Spanish, English or Hindi, the music is also made up of elements from different parts of the world fusing French chanson, bossa nova, gypsy jazz, folk-rock and Indian ragas. The subjects of the songs range from romance to global understanding. Her debut album "Extraordinary Rendition" says it all. While some of the songs in it are haunting with a tone of seductive longing, others cackle with a childlike energy and fantasy. Whichever way, her music beckons you to something far off yet does not feel distant.

The exotic ornament of her music would be incomplete without the jewels that are her band mates. Each of them is versed in diverse musical cultures. Ed Baskerville on cello is trained in the classical tradition. Isabelle Douglass on accordion is fluent in French Musette, Klezmer and Roma music. Marcus Cohen plays the trumpet and his signature is jazz. Aaron Kierbel on drums and Pawel Walerowski on cello add their own layers to the multifaceted tunes. Tom Edler, Safa Shokrai and Djordje Stijepovic are on upright bass.

The band was awarded the 2007 MASTERMIND grant to artists for enriching the cultural landscape of San Francisco.

But there is still more that makes Rupa´s music dig deeper. She is also a doctor and works as a physician at the University of California in San Francisco. Many of her songs derive inspiration from the vulnerable experiences with her patients. Having seen death at close quarters compelled her to write songs about the difficult emotion of love. "How do we love in the face of what our existence presents us with, which is our mortality or our current situation in the world?" she asks.

The title of her album--- "Extraordinary Rendition" is also not regular like her music. "Extraordinary Rendition" is a term used by the CIA for extrajudicially transferring terror suspects from one country to another where torture is allowed and harsh interrogation techniques such as waterboarding, stress positions, hypothermia and dogs are used to interrogate suspects. She used the name as a way to voice her protest and create awareness about the dark practice.

The band is touring the world leaving their extraordinary footprints in U.S., Canada, Switzerland, France, England, Spain, Sweden. They have performed to packed audience at the Montreal jazz festival, the Great American Music Hall, The Independent in San Francisco and a midsummer concert in Central Park.