The river begins in the northern air, creeps its way down, slowly at first, with ice melt and condensation on the hills, collecting tributaries and trinkles until it begins to flow and run, and with it, trade and language up and down its banks. We use the water to carry things in its runnings, in its flow, to move us through. We use the water to clean, to cook, to drink, and to nurture. When, at last, it reaches its end, it booms and opens outward into a million eddies, oxbows, and outflows; the mouth, the delta.
Here the river lets go and deposits itself, the primordial sludge of a region, digested, the death and rot of a landscape flushed out to then be used for growth and birth. The mouth is becoming out of nothing and here the dead can dance.
It is from these mouths mythos and music are created, Jazz and Rock N Roll. Rivers with names like Moldau, Danube, Yangtze, Tigris and Euphrates, it is where we first learned to live like we do, and house our story and song.
The Mississippi and the Mekong share things, they share people and music and fish and rice. My family is from the swamp, from the rot and landscape of the Mississippi, a mighty force. There was music in the way my grandfather spoke to me, the cruel cadence of cajun creole.
In certain parts of Saigon there is a march that shows up with the dead. Đội Kèn Tây, western trumpet team. The trumpet, a visual analogy to a river, a flow of a column of air to a bloom where the noise comes out like a mouth. A brass band will line up and play a loose, somewhat unstructured dirge while marching through the street, communicating the pain and mourning of a death. Each particular band has its own uniform, typically black and white, with old navy captains hats. Here is a video of a procession in the streets of Saigon.
In New Orleans there is the same, a brass band, dressed in particular uniforms, playing purposefully loosely structured songs, some slow, some fast. It is called the first line. Behind this line there are, growing as it proceeds, people who choose to flow with the procession, to add to the march. This is called the second line. Here is a demonstration of a procession in New Orleans by the Preservation Jazz Hall band:
THE BRASS
In 1815, Bishop Louis William Valentine Dubourg of New Orleans went to Lyon to try and secure more funding for his diocese. While in Lyon he talked to a few about an idea of founding a charitable association for the support of his regions, Louisiana and the two Floridas (South Alabama and Mississippi was West Florida, and everything east of Appalachicola was East Florida).
Five years later in Lyon, a missionary named Pauline Jaricot had the idea of forming an association whose members would contribute one cent a week for various missions in the church. The membership rose to a thousand and the offerings were sent mostly to Asia.
In 1822, the Vicar-General of New Orleans, Father Inglesi, was sent to Lyon by Bishop Dubourg, having heard about the success of Pauline Jaricot and her mission funds, established a similar society for American missions, but decided to unite, instead of distract, in a joint mutual effort. A meeting of the friends of the missions called, and on May 3, 1822, the Society for the Propagation of the Faith was established, with a declared mission to help Catholic missionaries by prayers and alms in the Americas and in Asia.
At this point in time in France, a trend in the Catholic church was on the go, the use of brass bands to promote and attract. You see the effects of this trend in the Salvation Army Bands of the 1870s, and later the brass bands of the temperance movements, but the origins and influence of a brass band was militaristic, a military tattoo. This trend had been on the go for hundreds of years, the fife and drum and bugle. Tools used to communicate things at a distance to soldiers in the field. Some records show the Ottomans organizing such bands in the 14th century.
But here, in the deltas of the Mississippi and the Mekong, they became something different. They became Charon taking one across the rivers Acheron and Styx, two other rivers of myth and death. The Society for the Propagation of the Faith had left a mark on the place but the musical mark is more primal than the religious rule, it lasted, and disconnected, and became its own form, a uniformed brass band.
On the Mississippi the band became a march and a parade, a celebration of life, and morphed with Jazz and free form expression, especially by those persecuted by racism and colonialism, it became an outward valve where expression was allowed, it is mourning after all, a place to play the trumpet and play it fucking loud. The second line was, and is, an emotional release en masse, a bacchanalia.
On the Mekong it didn’t veer as far but in form you can still see the connection, the tide marks.
THE FOOD
The plant and animal life in a delta run similar as well, and foodways morph between these two rivers mouths. Catfish and Rice grow well in both hot and humid climates, spice is needed as a cooling agent for the body, the flavors shine. The historic French touch on both permeate, west African influence from other French colonies, bánh mì breads and Po Boys, the crawfish and the shrimp. In the 1800’s these influences were introduced, but it was after the American-Vietnam war where refugees were relocated to cities like Houston and New Orleans that the foodways marriage was cemented. Vietcajun became a word in the lexicon.
And now, as many Việt Kiều (a term in Vietnam for Vietnamese outside of Vietnam) repatriate, dishes and recipes morph again in return. There are crawfish restaurants in Saigon that are Houston style Vietcajun.
This is all to talk about variations on a theme of universality; our collective human needs and wants, how we want both to cry and dance for the dead, always, and in hot climates at the mouths of rivers, with the bold fecund aroma of tidal marshes, we are affected by the Earth.
