This is the latest in our ongoing series of spotlight articles on Bay Area bands. To read past stories, click here.
By Roman Gokhman
CONTRIBUTOR
As a doctor of internal medicine at the University of California-San Francisco Medical Center, Rupa Marya deals with death nearly every day she clocks in for work.
One of the most difficult things she does is telling patients they are going to die.
Mortality has also figured prominently into Marya’s other job: leading her eclectic San Francisco band, Rupa and the April Fishes, a member of BandsOfTheBay.com.
“Medicine gives you a very privileged vantage point into what’s happening socially,” Marya says in a recent interview. “I see San Francisco from the underbelly. You get to see into people’s lives, into their families and the injustices. You get to see humility and the human experience and that is inspiring.”
The April Fishes, who play Aug. 23 at the Outside Lands Music Festival in Golden Gate Park, combine elements of French gypsy music, cabaret, jazz and Latin rhythms to tackle these issues in their songs.
Their debut album, “eXtraOrdinary rendition,” recently reached the top spot on the iTunes world music charts.
Marya, 33, traveled a long way to get to this point. Born in the Bay Area to Indian parents, a 4-year-old Rupa and her brother were sent to live with their grandparents in northern India while her parents were struggling financially in the states.
Eventually she was brought back to live with her parents and began playing music at 8 years old. Two years later her family moved to France, where she quickly picked up another language. Although Marya lived there for just a few years, “eXtraOrdinary rendition” is sung mostly in French, with some songs in Hindi, Spanish and English.
Since she was a child, Marya says, she knew she wanted to be either a musician or a doctor. She couldn’t choose between the two, so she pursued both in college.
She graduated from medical school in 2002, taking five years instead of three to complete her residency so she could still pursue her music.
“I was able to take big chunks of time and devote that just to my writing,” she says.
She has been an attending physician at UCSF Medical Center since last year.
When she wasn’t at the hospital, Marya, who also plays guitar, wrote music and performed in cafes, art galleries or on the street. After one particular cafe performance, she was approached by cellist Ed Baskerville.
“I was just starting to play some of this music out in public, and I had been wanting to play with a cellist for years,” she says. “He said (my) music would sound really good with cello. I said, ‘Tell me about it.’”
After chatting each other up, Marya and Baskerville realized they lived on the same block, so they agreed to get together and practice. Over the next several weeks and months a very awkward collaboration began.
“I had no experience playing with other musicians, and he was very stiff and classically trained,” she says.
But the two persevered, eventually adding a rotating cast of bandmates, including trumpet player Marcus Cohen, accordion player Isabel Douglass, upright bass player Safa Shokrai and drummer Aaron Kierbel.
The name of the group refers to April Fool’s Day. In France, on the first of April, tricksters stick little paper fishes on unsuspecting people’s backs.
While the name took a comedic turn, Marya’s music continues to revolve around mortality and society. Prior to recording “eXtraOrdinary rendition,” she had to deal with the death of her father in 2001, and her grandparents.
She says by taking breaks from dealing with to sickness and death and focusing on music keeps her from becoming desensitized.
“Dealing with mortality is really hard in my personal life, and then having to talk to families after a patient dies is very challenging,” she says. “Having to tell somebody they have a terminal illness is as well.”
Several songs on the album deal with death, including “Mal de mer” (”Seasickness”). In the song, a slow waltz, one lover is telling the other, “when you get seasick, fix your eyes on me.” In the ocean, and in the hospital, a sick person can concentrate on one target and feel less queasy.
Marya wrote “Wishful Thinking” after meeting the wife of a man who was dying in the hospital and seeing how both of them understood that everything loved must be left behind in death.
In “Yaad” (Memory), the sole Hindi song, Marya tells her father she misses him.
“The music gives me a place to understand and question some of the deeper issues that come up in medicine: The existential issues, the social issues, the philosophic issues about why we’re here and what we’re doing,” Marya says.
Two songs, album opener “San Francisco” and closer “Wishful Thinking,” incorporate sounds of San Francisco. One such sound is the Tuesday noon siren, which to Marya is a symbol that the government wants people to always be afraid and on alert. Another is a fog horn under the Golden Gate Bridge.
“(The sounds) grounded the whole album,” she says. “It started the whole piece with a sense of time and place.”
“EXtraOrdinary rendition” was written primarily in French because Marya was determined to write about love and the human condition in another language. The group’s next project will be mostly in Spanish, she says, due to the issues she has pondered as of late: immigration and health care
She was inspired on that topic after meeting a 53-year-old mother of three who waited at least eight months before coming in to check out a lump in her breast.
“When I met her she had cancer everywhere and had been admitted to the hospital to die,” Marya says. “I asked her why she didn’t come in before and she said she was afraid of being deported because she was undocumented.
“It infuriated me that a political reality would alienate someone from her body.”
So we at BOTB had an awesome time at the Pier 23 show in San Francisco last night.
