All The Rivers: Global Ensemble Raises Funds for Immigrants

The morning of March 11, Jules Wetchi stood on the Flynn Theater stage in Burlington and called out across the house: “Hello. Bonjour. Mbote na yo. Jambo.” Students from Burlington High School called back in the languages they knew.

Two miles away, federal immigration officials had gathered on Dorset Street in South Burlington, targeting an immigrant family. Protesters showed up and stayed most of the day.

All The Rivers, the ensemble Wetchi performs with, didn’t plan for that kind of proximity. But there it was.

The group is made up of more than 20 musicians from 10 countries, many of them immigrants who now live in Vermont. Their debut concert at the Flynn was their first full ticketed show, built around a purpose that’s gotten sharper as [federal immigration enforcement](https://www.ice.gov/) has intensified under the Trump administration. Every dollar raised goes to local organizations supporting immigrant communities in Vermont.

The show opened with a Lingala song from members of the Congolese Catholic Choir. Not a soft opening.

Avi Salloway, 40, leads the ensemble. He’s a University of Vermont graduate who spent years touring with Burlington rock band Billy Wylder, playing across North Africa and collaborating with Palestinian and Israeli youth musicians. He moved back to Vermont from Los Angeles about two and a half years ago and admits he was worried at first. “I was initially worried about the lack of cultural diversity,” he said. But he came around. “I’ve always had a deep affinity and connection to Vermont. And zooming out, it really does have a very welcoming community and a progressive aspect that I really appreciate.”

All The Rivers first came together at Burlington’s Festival of Fools in 2024. That performance wasn’t supposed to lead anywhere permanent. A one-off, according to Emily Landenberger, a friend of Salloway’s who speaks for the group.

Then the climate shifted.

“In light of all of the tension and trauma that the immigrant community is facing right now, Avi wanted to reconvene the group,” Landenberger said.

So they did. And the Flynn show, the real debut, became the result. Cross-cultural music as something more than celebration. As a fundraising mechanism, yes, but also as a signal. Twenty-plus musicians sharing a stage, pulling from a dozen different musical traditions, in a state that sometimes gets dismissed as too white and too quiet to hold that kind of creative range.

Salloway pushes back on that read. Hard. “I have been lucky and fortunate to have a lot of experience working with people from different backgrounds and cultures,” he said. Vermont’s immigrant population, particularly in Burlington and surrounding Chittenden County, has grown steadily, and the refugee resettlement network here has long been one of the more active ones in New England.

The Flynn preview for high schoolers was free. Intentionally so. Those students watched musicians from the Democratic Republic of Congo, and elsewhere, perform together in a theater that usually costs money to get into. Some of them echoed Wetchi’s multilingual greeting back at him without prompting.

The full concert followed. Proceeds went to local groups doing direct support work with immigrants, though the ensemble has kept the focus on the music itself as the draw, not just the cause.

Salloway called the project “filling a really important void in the movement to build immigrant justice.” That framing, music as movement infrastructure, is one that artists around the country are taking seriously right now, and it’s showing up in smaller cities and towns in ways that don’t always get covered.

VTDigger first reported on the ensemble’s debut and the parallel events unfolding that March morning.

The Flynn concert is done. But All The Rivers isn’t. Landenberger said the goal is to keep performing, keep raising money, keep building the thing that the March 11 show started. Burlington’s creative community has always punched above its weight. This ensemble, two miles from a federal immigration action on the same morning they took the stage, might be its most pointed recent example.