To say that the Bay Rising Tour is “environmentally conscious” would be a laughable understatement. It is in fact completely human-powered, with San Francisco bands Rupa & the April Fishes and Shake Your Peace biking 200 miles to play 11 shows around the Bay Area over 10 days. They will be carrying with them their own stage, as well as a unique sound system that will be powered at each show by volunteers who pedal to create electricity. The tour starts tomorrow and comes to the San Jose Bike Party Friday.

Singer-songwriter Rupa Marya of Rupa & the April Fishes said they were inspired to put the tour together after years of international touring left her wanting to make a local connection.

“We’ve been going around the world so much in the last four years, I was feeling like ‘how much do I know my own Bay Area?’” says Marya, a Mountain View native. “How can I put that energy and curiosity and joy into my own neighborhood?”

Toward that end, she had been doing things like traveling Bay Area backroads and visiting missions around Northern California, starting to ask a lot of questions about local landmarks, ecosystems and communities. At an Occupy SF show, she met Paul Freedman, co-founder of Rock the Bike, who came up with the bicycle-powered concert system. She told him she wanted to so something local, and soon she was working on the Bay Rising Tour.

“It’s exciting because you can know an area from driving, but you don’t really know it unless you walk it or bike it,” she says.

She’s under no illusions about how hard it will be to pull off—“we’re going to be exhausted,” she admits—but the tour fits well into her view that activism begins in one’s own backyard, reaching out to individuals and communities around her in a time of economic and social collapse on a mass scale.

“We’re living in a time of emergency. Our role as artists is to do something that reminds us of our creative capacity,” she says.

After the band finishes the tour, they’ll be releasing the title track of their upcoming album Build on May 1, in honor of strikers around the world. The album will be released in September.

“It’s in the can,” says Marya. “I’m really excited about how it sounds.”

The Bay Rising Tour comes to the San Jose Bike Party on Friday, April 20 at 8pm. For location and route details, go to sjbikeparty.org.

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.

Rupa Marya calls her style “intentionally unclean.” Beyond that, it’s difficult to explain. Cooler and crazier than useless phrases like “world music” could hope to describe, her San Francisco-based band Rupa and the April Fishes takes gypsy jazz on a punky, border-crashing joy ride that sprawls across multiple styles, cultures and languages. Of Indian descent, born in California with an international upbringing, Marya takes the influences she’s absorbed and makes a particularly intense brand of dance music. She took the time to do an interview in advance of her upcoming performance headlining San Jose Jazz’s Winter Fest 2012 on Sunday, March 11.

STEVE PALOPOLI: Your music and style has a distinctly bohemian vibe to it. What appeals to you about that sound and look, and how did your musical style develop?

RUPA MARYA: It’s more intentionally unclean than necessarily bohemian. I appreciate the sounds of intersection, of things moving against each other–different gestures sonically. The mixture of symphonic culture with street culture, here with there, past and present. Music becomes a pastiche collage where you can trace different origins with your ear. I also appreciate the long history of rebel music, sounds that are responding to current injustice with insistence and courage.

In what ways is the Bay Area a good place to play the kind of music you play, and in what ways is it a difficult place?

I feel this music is a representation of the pluralistic identity of the Bay Area. On any given day, walking down Castro Street in Mountain View, you can hear several languages being spoken, sounds from different cultural backgrounds blaring from different cars. Our experience here is just that, an experience of pluralism. The challenge is how do you overcome the small-mindedness of people who want to believe the Bay Area is something else–such as an English-only place. It simply isn’t. How do you invite people with that desire to see the world in a simplistic way, to recognize the existing differences without fear but rather with open ears, arms, eyes and heart? I think some people appreciate hearing a celebration of these intersections, an invitation to shared space of engagement through sound and performance.