.Live Review: Rupa and the April Fishes at Winter Jazz Fest

The question for an artist like Rupa Marya must be: what do you do when you’re so well known for your unpredictability that it threatens to become predictable? Her sold-out show Sunday with her band Rupa & The Fishes—the finale of what appears to have been an extremely successful Winter Fest for San Jose Jazz—revealed the answer.
At this point, Marya’s music has been accused of every kind of border violation—smashing, crashing, stomping, flaunting, etc. Believe me, she loves this. But it also means that more people who go to her shows are ready for her mash-up of musical traditions, genres, languages and whatever else. Gypsy jazz cut with, say, cumbia and a wicked spaghetti western horn line may not be enough to get them high anymore.
That could be a problem, since Marya and her band clearly feed off that element of surprise, the energy that the audience bounces back at them when they’re creating something new, subversive, unheard. There’s an almost sexual element to it, not just because of Marya’s sultry performance style, but also because the band whips through a Kama Sutra of world music, and both performers and audience get caught up in the sheer boundless exuberance of it.
They’re finishing up their third album right now, and it was interesting to see Sunday night how the new songs toy with the expectations that have been put on the band. Rather than devolving into a sound-alike string of songs that drag every culture under the sun in kicking and screaming, Marya has broadened her range, juxtaposing songs that sound much more traditional to American audiences with her signature wild musical imagination.
The opening song, “Build,” was a good example of this. Sung in English and expanding exactly the way the title suggests, it was pure, smartly arranged indie folk. Then she launched into her patented global-freak-jazz style for the next few songs—part Django, part travelogue, part Occupy camp.
One minute she’d do “Inheritance,” which is almost twee folk, and the next she’d cover the Clash’s “Guns of Brixton,” launching into a Patti-Smith-like diatribe about the world economy as a gambling operation out to bilk us all. Then just when it felt like I might have my geographical and stylistic bearings, she’d turn a ’50s Bollywood song into a call-and-response rockabilly number.
Speaking of the Clash, I particularly liked “Electric Gumbo Radio,” which I believe is a new song. It’s a powerful take off on “This is Radio Clash,” with insistent ska guitar and lyrics of resistance that serve nicely as Marya’s mission statement, or declaration of war, or however you choose to look at it.
The audience, which was buzzing even before the band took the stage at Theatre at San Pedro Square, was enraptured with Marya, and why not? A passionate performer who can go from a stomp to a waltz to a whisper and back again (as on “L’Elephant”), she needs to be experienced live. In choosing her as a headliner to define the eclectic urban chic of their newest festival, San Jose Jazz made a perfect pick.