Interview: Rupa and the April Fishes Headline Winter Jazz Fest

I know you sometimes play jazz festivals like this one, but how much do you consider what you do ‘jazz’?
Jazz composer Marcus Shelby once said that my music was just like jazz, a balance of architecture and free movement. It’s the excitement of creating songs that can fly in their improvisation and their composed force. I play with musicians who teach me a great deal about harmonic structure and movement. Even though it has become somewhat enshrined by the western classical approach to music, I feel jazz is a living breathing art form which belongs to the long tradition of rebel music, a form at the intersection of things expressing the contradictions and bringing to light things that are not being readily recognized—using sound, form, improvisation and community gathering as tools to do this.