Rupa y yo

I have a scant hour today to post my tribute to Palo Altan Rupa Marya, of Rupa and The April Fishes. I trust that the story itself will compensate for my telling of it.

Rupa and her band were driving across Tennessee and looking for a place to eat lunch Tuesday while our futuristic communications devices let us exchange ideas, on behalf of Patch Palo Alto AOL. While awaiting the chance to speak with her, I had fantasized about flying (via my airlines "rewards" program) to catch up with her in Austin, Texas, Thursday -- tomorrow -- at a quaint club I know well called MoMos.

Previously, I had dreamed of checking out her show at the Millenium Park in Chicago, near the famous public art monument "Clouds" by Anish Kapoor; my initial plan for this post was to use it as in indirect preview of Palo Alto's World Music Day, back in June; Rupa and her band were actually in Mendocino that weekend, for the Sierra Nevada World Music Festival. 

She confirmed my suspicion that although she has performed in twenty countries or so and thirty of the top festivals in the world, she has not had a proper public show in Palo Alto, her hometown. (Actually, she's from Los Altos Hills and attended Castilleja, but her brother went to Gunn so we'll claim her). 

When then-mayor Peter Drekmeir invited me to help plan the first Palo Alto World Music Day in 2009, my very first thought was to get Rupa and The April Fishes as a headliner. Her agent held the date for us, but it was decided to keep our version of Fete De La Musique without a main stage or focal point, to keep the emphasis on amateurs ("for the love of it") making street music.

Rupa said she is touring behind new material for a planned third album. Her previous two sets, both available on the excellent Cumbancha Records, of Charlotte, Vermont, near Burlington, are called "Extraordinary Rendition" (2008)and "Este Mundo" (2009). 

Rupa is in what could be called Rupa 3.0. Rupa 1.0 was when she was known as the singing-physician who wrote songs in French, Spanish, English and Hindi. Exemplary songs from that era include "Une Americaine a Paris" and "Wishful Thinking".

In 2.0, Rupa, consistant with her work performing and advocating for border populations, were songs written and sung mostly in Spanish. When I asked her about her shift towards Spanish she informed me that her five most recent new compositions are all in English, including something called "Build" which is about farming and the implications of our post-agricultural world (which reminds me of my one-time client Helena Norberg-Hodge of the International Society of Ecology and Culture). 

Rupa says she is on sabbatical from her second career, as an attending pediatric oncologist at UCSF Hospital. She corrected my phrasing and said he has one career and that her work as a scientist and care-giver is integrated to her work as a band-leader, song-writer performer and activist.

She bemoaned the role of pharmaceutical companies and lauded Healthy San Francisco, which provides all citizens of that "tiny island nation" (her phrasing), where she resides,  a modicum of preventative medicine. 

Disclosure: I was briefly an unpaid member of the artist management team, based in Oakland, that sought to introduce Rupa and The April Fishes to the music business operative and entities. Today I am one of her biggest fans and an unpaid contributor to this website. 

Who else I think of a propos Rupa Marya: Mother Theresa, Vaclav Havel, Michael Franti, Manu Chau, Patti Smith, Jocelyn Elders, Mona Caron, Sunaura Taylor, John McRea (of Cake, she said she met him recently), Ani DiFranco, Tommy Jordan of Palo Alto who also makes world music and speaks some French; Victor Jara, John Lennon.

Margaret Meade said "never underestimate the ability of a small group of people to change the world." If she had met Rupa Marya she might have said never underestimate what one person can do.

We left our conversation with not so idle talk of bringing The April Fishes to Palo Alto, perhaps to Mitchell Park bowl, maybe Cubberley Theater or (and I'm adding this part ex parte) Lytton Plaza for some impromptu busking.

She is playing quasi-locally August 25 a free show for SFJazz at Union Square and and Saturday, Aug. 27 at The Independent nightclub on Divisidero in San Francisco, with her Cumbancha label-mates Sergent Garcia.

I had fantasized of Rupa, perhaps wearing an Oakland Raiders jersey, performing "Wishful Thinking" at the half-time memorial I had organized for The Danny McCallister Fund at Gunn High. Her song, referencing "an unsavory crew" of pirates but actually about the medical demise of a loved one, is a slow minor-chord waltz, but for me presages Johnny Depp's pirates franchise (and I'm stealing this bit from Rebecca Solnit's "Infinite City") and is descendent from Robert Louis Stevenson's stepson's drawing of a mythical "treasure island." Rupa Marya is the 50th treasure of San Francisco and we should nurture her roots in our little town.