Ken Burns & Lynn Novick’s 18-hour The Vietnam War traverses the wide span of human emotion. Our music – the tracks included in this collection - is one part of the musical mosaic that is its soundtrack, along with Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ appropriately raw and searing electronic sounds, and emblematic music from the period - Dylan, Hendrix, Woodstock, etc.

Our process – in close collaboration with the filmmakers, who were present at the session - was akin to many other journeys Silkroad Ensemble has undertaken: exploring traditional and popular music from both sides of the 17th parallel, and finding ways to make them sing in tune with the needs of the film. Underlying it all is an attempt to provide some empathy for ‘the other,’ not so much by literally ‘representing’ the music of one side or the other, but by making music that bridges the gap, that creates some connective threads between very different experiences.

Take for example the various settings of The Wounded Soldier, a North Vietnamese folk song by Pham Duy that dates from the war with the French in the 1950s. Its lyrics tell the story of a returning soldier – When Johnny Comes Marching Home but from the other side of the battle. The feelings it invokes are as close to universal as one can get, and the tune has an authentic lyricism and stoic pathos we all can recognize in our own way. Our versions (Tracks 1, 5 & 8) try out to bring out these qualities in a variety of ways, to keep the integrity of the melody intact while providing settings that would connect it to specific situations, and perhaps to a wider lineage. In the film it’s used in many contexts, most movingly during scenes of North Vietnamese troops coming home, helping us remember that these are people too, with broken homes and tragic endings, hoping things aren’t quite as bad as they might seem. ‘They’ are ‘us,’ in different circumstances. In our music we try to convey this empathy, now, years after the fact.

Percussionist Haruka Fujii & Shane Shanahan’s compelling rendition of the People and Fighters Unite (‘Tinh Quan Dan’) gives us a sense of the loftiness of the stakes, of the ideals – on both sides – that were too often obscured in the fog of this particular war. Marimba and drums, elemental instruments, invoking the sounds of nature, and reaching back to our oldest notions of war and conflict.

The surprising, masterful, and heartbreaking Lullaby (Track 7) provides the counterbalance to this. Lullabies console because everyone – babies AND their parents - needs consolation. Iranian kemanchevirtuoso Kayhan Kahlor’s performance packs a world of hurt, regret, and sorrow into this simple but expansive ru con, from the southern region of Nam Bo.

We’ve also included two tracks that were not used in the final film. Uot Mi (Track 4) is our version of Trinh Cong Son’s first hit, a love song from 1957. Son himself – the ‘Bob Dylan of Vietnam – infuriated the French, alienated the South Vietnamese government, and was eventually imprisoned after reunification. And we end the album with an act of musical reconciliation, bringing together two long lost members of the long-neck lute family – the Appalachian banjo and the Vietnamese dan bau, performed by Vanessa Van-Anh Vo and Sarah Jarosz. Their vehicle is a tune used many times for this purpose over the years, the civil rights anthem We Shall Overcome.

-- Evan Ziporyn