The Congolese Catholic Choir was mired in disagreement. Over what, precisely, would have been hard for most Vermonters to parse — unless, of course, they happened to speak Swahili. Even then, deciphering the nuances of the group’s animated, mid-rehearsal debate one Sunday in February would have been a tall task.
At issue was how to translate the lyrics of a song called “All the Rivers” into Swahili. Avi Salloway, a lanky American-born guitarist and the song’s writer, stood just outside the semicircle of colorfully dressed singers. He fingerpicked his guitar, using its neck almost like a conductor’s baton to urge the choir to join him in singing the tune’s sweet, simple melody and lone verse: “All the rivers lead us to the sea.”
He might as well have been singing to himself.
Ignoring Salloway, Kisubi Badibanga defended his translation of the lyric to the other seven singers in the choir. Badibanga was still dressed in a snazzy white tuxedo jacket with black trim and a red bow tie after attending Mass that morning at St. Joseph’s Cathedral in Burlington, where the multigenerational choir of Congolese refugees sings every other week. But as Badibanga made his case, Malenga Alimasi cut him off from three chairs over, gesticulating insistently as she offered her competing translation.
That, in turn, prompted spirited suggestions from Dr. Jules Wetchi, the choir’s de facto leader, and Badibanga’s son Alfani on the other side of the semicircle. Caught in the verbal crossfire, a defeated Badibanga slumped over the conga drums in front of him, grinning in exasperation. Next to him, his wife, Marceline, just chuckled and shook her head.
Such are the challenges of assembling a band of performers whose goal is to blend the music of nearly a dozen nations and half a dozen languages.
The translation squabble came near the end of an intense, four-hour marathon rehearsal at the Flynn’s Chase Studio in Burlington. It was the first of only three sessions the (mostly) full band would have before two fast-approaching gigs next door at the grandest theater in Vermont. Fatigue and frayed nerves were perhaps inevitable, even for a group whose default setting tends to be joy.
The Congolese Catholic Choir is part of a new ensemble called All the Rivers that will make its official debut on the Flynn Main Stage next Wednesday, March 11, with an afternoon matinee for Burlington High School students and an evening performance for the general public. Conceived of and led by Salloway, the group is composed of about 20 immigrant musicians from 10 countries living in Vermont.
Their arrival on the scene comes at a fraught time for immigrants in Vermont and around the country. The Trump administration has embarked on an unrelenting crusade against immigrants, pushing xenophobic rhetoric and using U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement as its cudgel. Sometimes-violent raids and mass deportation efforts of dubious legality make headlines almost daily, stoking fear and despair among immigrants from urban Minneapolis to Vermont dairy farms.
And yet, inside the Chase Studio on a chilly February afternoon, the promise of America unfurled note by note, bar by bar, through joyous music played and sung in disparate languages by musicians whose specific journeys differ but whose motivation for coming here was the same. As immigrants have since the Pilgrims landed, members of All the Rivers arrived in the Green Mountains seeking to build better lives for themselves and their families.
The band’s music presents a tapestry of cultures, languages and styles woven together toward a common goal: raising the voices of immigrant communities in Vermont. In All the Rivers, a Colombian singer-songwriter performs an Argentinean zamba backed by a Costa Rican bassist and a first-generation Japanese American drummer. Two African percussionists lead a song in Susu, a language of Guinea, with the help of a Haitian blues singer and a Grammy-winning violinist from Mexico. A choir of African refugees transforms an American guitarist’s mellow indie-folk song into a rousing affirmation.
The members of All the Rivers are all documented and live here legally. They are mothers and fathers, business owners, teachers, doctors, and community leaders. Some came to the U.S. for love or for education and careers, while others found refuge here after escaping unimaginable horrors in their native countries. Together, they are living proof that the notion of America as a land of opportunity is more than just a nice idea. Rather, the mingling of diverse perspectives, backgrounds and experiences reflected in the band’s global musical melting pot is fundamental to this country’s identity.
In that sense, there isn’t a more American band in Vermont than this unlikely group of immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers. And when All the Rivers formally introduce themselves and the nonprofit that shares their name to their Vermont neighbors at the Flynn next week, they’ll hope that their mission to foster cultural understanding and support for local immigrant communities isn’t lost in translation.
Taking Flight
Cintia Lovo Arias had an easier time than Salloway when she introduced her original tune “El Águila y el Condor” (“The Eagle and the Condor”) to her bandmates at the February rehearsal. Her song, one of a couple that she leads in the All the Rivers program, is primarily sung in Spanish. But call-and-response sections voiced by the entire group include echoing lines in English, which is the second — or third or fourth — language for everyone in the band save for Salloway and drummer Daiki Hirano of Cabot.
Lovo Arias sat facing the band with the choir to her left and Salloway and the rest of the players stretching to the right. Salloway plucked the song’s slinky intro on electric guitar. Lovo Arias began to sing a few bars, but something was off.
“Stop, stop, stop,” she said into the mic, waving her free hand. “That’s way too fast. The feel is wrong.”
Addressing Salloway and the rhythm section of Hirano and Costa Rican bassist Maiz Vargas Sandoval, Lovo Arias explained that the song is a zamba, a style of Argentine folk music and dance — not to be confused with Brazilian samba. She picked up an acoustic guitar and demonstrated. Salloway had played it as a peppy six-eight shuffle, but zamba is meant to unfurl more slowly and elegantly in three-quarter time.
Getting the feel, Salloway joined in on guitar, followed by Vargas Sandoval on bass and Hirano on the drum kit. Beside them, Ousmane Camara from Guinea plunked out notes on his balafon — a marimba-like percussion instrument — while Assane Coly from Senegal accented the beat with a hand drum called a djembe. As the band vamped, the song coalesced into an eddying swirl of sound, and Lovo Arias began to sing.
The 42-year-old singer-songwriter was born in Medellín, Colombia, and grew up there in the 1980s and ’90s. Though she and her three siblings were raised in a middle-class family, Lovo Arias lived in the shadow of drug cartels and guerrilla groups that terrorized the country — especially during the reign of drug lord Pablo Escobar and his Medellín Cartel.
It was hard, she said in an interview with Seven Days, but Lovo Arias also described a “beautiful childhood” surrounded by family. She started singing as a young girl, then studied at a conservatory in Miami and worked as a professional musician there for many years.
When the pandemic hit, she and her partner, former Toubab Krewe bassist David Pransky, decamped to his native Cabot, where they live with their young son and own a cannabis dispensary. Lovo Arias’ central Vermont band, La Lovo, released its debut album, Right Here, in May 2024.
“El Águila y el Condor” doesn’t appear on that record but would fit right in with the album’s groove-heavy fusion of ’90s-style alt-rock, soul and Colombian folk music. The song is based on “The Prophecy of the Eagle and the Condor,” a folktale common among Indigenous cultures in South America.
The story varies slightly depending on the telling, but it essentially suggests that humanity long ago split into two groups: the rational and industrious, represented by the eagle of the north; and the intuitive and heart-centered condor of the south. The legend predicts that after 500 years, their paths will converge and humankind will unite in a new era of harmony.
“Given the current political climate, I got inspired by that theme,” Lovo Arias said in an interview. “How nice would it be that everyone would come together?”
I am the one, you are the one /
Lyrics from El Águila y el Condor” by Cintia Lovo Arias
We are the ones who love.
When All the Rivers united at the song’s chorus, it was, in fact, transcendent.
In her dusky, soulful alto, Lovo Arias kicked off the call-and-response, singing “Los que piensan,” which the group translated: “The ones who think.” Then: “Los que cuidan / The ones who care / Los que sienten / The ones who feel / Los que aman! / The ones who love!”
The music swelled as they sang together: “I am the one, you are the one / We are the ones who love / Mind and heart will take flight / Like the Eagle and the Condor.”
Playing the Parts
If Salloway let the occasional tension of the February rehearsal get to him, he never showed it. The 41-year-old from Rhode Island remained cool, directing the musicians with enthusiasm and the superhuman patience of a preschool teacher focusing a classroom of hyperactive kids. His efforts were rewarded at numerous points in those four hours when the band’s simmering potential burst through.
One of those moments was during a song he brought to the band called “Vineyard.” The tune is from a 2013 album by his longtime Boston/Vermont band Billy Wylder, but its roots stretch well beyond New England.
In 2011, following the dissolution of his Boston band Hey Mama — an evolution of his Vermont folk duo Avi & Celia with Grammy-nominated vocalist Celia Woodsmith — Salloway bought a one-way ticket to Jerusalem and began working with Heartbeat, an international music nonprofit that fosters dialogue between Israeli and Palestinian youths through song. Among his many roles with the group over five years, he served as its touring director and organized trips around the globe. In 2014, he brought a Heartbeat ensemble to visit Vermont.
By then, the University of Vermont alum was living in Cambridge, Mass., and trying to build momentum with Billy Wylder. One night, he ended up backstage after a Boston show by Tuareg guitarist Bombino, aka the “Jimi Hendrix of the Desert.” The two jammed and hit it off, and Bombino later invited Salloway to join his band. He toured with Bombino for the next three years.
That experience undoubtedly prepared Salloway to lead All the Rivers. Bombino doesn’t speak much English, so he and Salloway often communicated through their guitars.
“The sound of the desert, it’s primarily in the inflection of the playing,” Salloway explained. “It’s less of a Western approach and more feel, less analytical. It was inspiring.”
You can hear Salloway’s application of those non-Western principles in several All the Rivers songs but especially on “Vineyard.” At its core, the English-language song resembles the earnest indie folk of the era in which it was written — think the Head and the Heart or Fleet Foxes in their mellower moments. But its defining trait is a sunny, tumbling guitar melody that evokes South African guitarist Ray Phiri’s work on Paul Simon’s Graceland.
In the original Billy Wylder version, a second guitar harmonizes that melody line. With All the Rivers, Camara plays the harmony on the balafon, while Lovo Arias, the Congolese choir and the rest of the group sing the melody with a series of ecstatic la-la-las. The effect is a brilliant polyphony that reflects the joyous essence of the band.
“All the Rivers” may be the group’s anthem, but “Vineyard” is perhaps the clearest and, for Western audiences, most accessible example of its vibrant multicultural musical fusion.
A Dynamic Duo
While music is the focus, All the Rivers’ Flynn shows next week will suffer no shortage of feasts for the eyes. From the bright and colorful garb worn by the Congolese choir as its members dance onto the stage to the projections crafted by Alex Reeves of Burlington design studio Vanish Works to the sheer visual impact of this sprawling mass of musicians, audiences may have a hard time deciding where to look.
Pro tip: Keep an eye on Ousmane Camara and Assane Coly. They might just steal the show.
Camara, 42, and Coly, 49, are bandmates in Sabouyouma, a seven-piece Afro-funk ensemble that’s been introducing local audiences to West African grooves since 2016, just after Camara arrived in the Green Mountains from Guinea. He moved here to be with a Vermont woman with whom he fell in love in his home country, though they are no longer together. Coly, a percussionist who emigrated from Senegal in the mid-2010s, is also a fixture in the local African drum ensembles Africa Jamono and Jeh Kulu.
The two men feature on “Sabouy,” a song from Sabouyouma’s 2019 EP of the same name. Camara said the Susu word translates to “Give thanks to the best.”
“The best we call sabouy,” he said in an interview. He chuckled and added: “So that’s why I give that music [to All the Rivers].”
Camara comes from a family of griots, West African storytellers and musicians who preserve the oral histories and traditions of their communities. Because of that — and because a straight Susu-to-English translation would be very difficult — he declined to dig much further into the tune’s lyrics, offering only this: “Music is the root.”
In other words, what Camara sings is far less important than what his music makes you feel. “Sabouy,” with its deeply syncopated rhythms and hypnotic melodies, will make you feel like dancing.
While the song is distinctly West African in both sound and language, it’s as much a multicultural musical amalgam as the rest of All the Rivers’ program, according to Vargas Sandoval. The Costa Rican bassist is the founder and leader of the Burlington psychedelic Latin band Sonido Mal Maiz.
“A lot of my music is part of the African diaspora in Latin America,” he said. “So these rhythms, like the Tuareg music or a lot of Senegalese and West African rhythms, are also part of my culture at some level.”
Exploring those cross-cultural musical connections with players of Camara and Coly’s caliber was a big draw for him to join All the Rivers, he added.
Onstage, Camara is a wiry bundle of kinetic energy, constantly moving to the groove. He’s a master of the balafon, a melodic percussion instrument made with hardwood keys and played with mallets. Its Western cousin is the xylophone, but the balafon uses hollowed calabash gourds instead of pipes to create resonance. Camara plays it with remarkable precision and, when called for, speed. In moments, it looks and sounds as though he’s striking with half a dozen mallets rather than two.
Coly, meanwhile, exudes a steely cool. No matter the tempo or rhythm, his demeanor behind his djembe is almost monk-like, even when he’s drumming complex polyrhythms. The contrast and energetic interplay between the two musicians are infectious.
During the rehearsal’s final run-through of “Sabouy,” Camara and Coly ended the tune on a series of emphatic hits. The Congolese choir erupted in cheers and applause.
Breaking the Ice
When Salloway asked the members of the Congolese Catholic Choir to translate the eight-word lyrics of “All the Rivers” from English to Swahili, he had no way of knowing it would be such an ordeal.
The Congolese singers speak French, Lingala and at least four distinct dialects of Swahili, some dramatically different from one another. So agreeing on even a seemingly simple translation is a challenge — especially when the meaning of the words is as important as their meter and how they fit a song’s rhythm.
By the following week’s rehearsal they had finally landed on a translation: “Mito yote yatuongosa baharini.”
Most members of the Congolese choir speak very little English, particularly the group’s older generation. That’s generally true of Congolese immigrants living in the greater Burlington area. Many, like Kisubi Badibanga and his family, are refugees who escaped the civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo that killed millions.
Speaking through his son Bienfait, Badibanga, 57, said his family fled Congo to a Tanzanian refugee camp in 1996. They lived in Mozambique before immigrating to the U.S. and arriving in Vermont in 2014. Citing language barriers, the challenges of accessing basic services and, of course, Vermont’s colder climate, Badibanga said adapting to life here was hard. The transition was made easier by people such as Dr. Jules Wetchi.
Wetchi, 47, started the Congolese Catholic Choir in 2016. He’s a physician who arrived in Vermont in 2013 and founded the New American Public Health Initiative, a nonprofit that provides programs and services to new Americans. He also hosts “African Variety Show,” a Town Meeting TV program that delivers information on health and community resources for African immigrants in Vermont. Wetchi was the one who introduced Salloway to the choir.
Two summers ago, organizers of the annual Festival of Fools in Burlington asked Salloway, who had recently returned to Vermont from living in Los Angeles, to put together a band of new American musicians for the street performance fest. He had only three weeks to assemble the group.
So Salloway began calling on friends and dropping by places where immigrant musicians played. He caught wind of an unusual choir at St. Joseph’s and attended a service to see it. He struck up a friendship with Wetchi, who convinced the choir to sing with the 10 or so other musicians Salloway had recruited for the one-off show.
The group needed a name. While “All the Rivers” might evoke “From the river to the sea,” a slogan often used by pro-Palestinian activists, Salloway said it’s actually a reference to the novel All the Rivers by Dorit Rabinyan, about a Palestinian man and an Israeli woman who fall in love in New York City.
“As I imagined this ensemble taking shape — artists from different countries, languages and traditions coming together — the image of rivers converging felt deeply resonant,” he said. “Distinct currents, each with their own source and story, flowing together into something larger. All the Rivers felt like the perfect expression of what we were building.”
On August 3, 2024, a beta version of All the Rivers performed on Burlington’s Church Street Marketplace and in City Hall Park to crowds of several hundred people.
“It was definitely raw,” Salloway said. “But there was something there.”
Salloway said he was intrigued by the ensemble’s potential but put it on the back burner amid other, more pressing projects. But after President Donald Trump took office again last year, Salloway said he felt more urgency to revisit the band.
“It was like, This is the time to bring this band to bigger stages and do deeper cultural work here in Vermont,” he said.
The Green Mountains have so far been spared the mass immigrant roundups recently seen in cities such as Minneapolis and, closer to home, Portland, Maine. But ICE has made its presence felt in Vermont. Dozens of local immigrants have been detained or expelled from the country in the past year.
While Salloway may be right that it’s time for deeper cultural work in Vermont, it’s also a risky moment for immigrants in the state to raise their profiles. That conundrum isn’t lost on the members of All the Rivers.
“I’m an American citizen. I have a blue passport,” Lovo Arias said. “But I’m still scared because I’m brown. I look Latino, and it seems like looking different now is just enough of a reason to get detained.”
She added that she’s called lawyers for advice on the chance that she or her 4-year-old son are detained. She’s called his school to find out about protocols if ICE agents show up.
“It just breaks my heart. I never thought that I would leave Colombia to come to the United States and feel this way,” she said. “This is a land for everybody. This is my home.”
Still, she believes speaking up is worth the risk.
“It’s just crucial to bring awareness,” she said. “There’s a community of immigrants here that need support from the Vermont community. And we’re not just contributing; we’re enriching the culture here.”
Ernesto Villalobos is a world-renowned violinist from Mexico who lives with his family in Randolph. Both he and singer Steeve Valcourt, who lives in Woodstock and leads the Haitian band Lakou Mizik, missed the February rehearsal. While Villalobos echoed Lovo Arias’ anxiety in an interview from his native Veracruz, he said it’s important not to shrink from the moment.
“A lot of us are finding a home in Vermont because of the promise that it holds,” he said, praising the state for its history of welcoming immigrants and, citing the Green Mountain Boys, standing up for its principles and independence. He said he hopes the show will remind his neighbors of those ideals.
“Music is that medicine that sometimes we need as a society,” he said. “And what better way than to be playing with an African choir and some West African percussionists and a Colombian singer?”
While music may help heal and inspire, its tangible impact only goes so far. A good song can’t feed a hungry child or protect a refugee who’s been wrongfully arrested.
Music is the medicine that sometimes we need as a society.
Ernesto Villalobos
All the Rivers’ larger goal is to effect lasting change. More than a band, it’s a nonprofit whose stated mission is to “[amplify] immigrant voices through music and storytelling, fostering belonging, cultural understanding, and connection across communities in Vermont and beyond.” It also aims to bolster infrastructure that supports those communities.
To that end, All the Rivers launched a $100,000 crowdfunding campaign last week. All profits from the Flynn shows will go to groups that help Vermont immigrants access food, health care, legal aid and other necessities, including the nonprofit Migrant Justice and AALV, a social-services organization for immigrants. Salloway and other band members are developing a touring ensemble and educational workshop that they plan to bring to festivals, performing arts centers, universities and schools. The guitarist is already working with AALV to develop afterschool music programs. The band’s debut album is slated for release this summer, along with a documentary film.
Salloway is a full-time musician who supplements his income by teaching private music lessons. For the past six months, Salloway said, he’s been working 40 to 50 hours a week, unpaid, on All the Rivers. He hopes eventually to at least partly support himself with the project and hire staff. One day, he’d like to hand the reins of the organization over to Vermont immigrants.
“There’s a hole in the resistance movement and solidarity movement of supporting immigrants,” he said, “and that is that largely it’s not led by immigrants, either because they’re not invited into the spaces for organizing or intentionally having to be lower profile.” But All the Rivers, he said, “is super vibrant — culturally, extremely rich — and has so much to offer Vermont and beyond.
“My goal,” he continued, “is to help build the organization, create the spaces for these folks and make some magic happen.” ➆
The original print version of this article was headlined “An American Band | Featuring 20 local musicians from 10 countries, All the Rivers raises the voices of Vermont’s immigrant communities”
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This article appears in March 4-11 • 2026.
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