Trumpeting new ideas

The
leading trumpet players of the last several decades coaxed no shortage of
distinctive sounds out of the instrument. Miles Davis was known for evoking
extraordinary pathos. Wynton Marsalis can make it sing with astounding clarity.
And Jon Faddis can play in an upper register so high that you might wonder if
the notes are off the chart.

            But Cuong Vu, who has been rising
steadily on the avant-garde scene, has still managed to find a unique approach
to the instrument. He has recorded three albums as a leader and, because he
takes the trumpet into uncharted territory, he’s been recruited to work with an
eclectic array of jazz, pop, and avant-garde artists, including Pat Metheny,
David Bowie, Laurie Anderson and Dave Douglas.

            Each track on a Cuong Vu album is a
sonic journey. It could be hauntingly melodic (“Dreams, Come Play With Me”) or
wildly primal (“Faith”). Or, like “Vina’s Lullaby,” it might start melodically,
but as the music progresses, all three instruments — trumpet, bass, and drums
— grow in presence and character. After building to an abstract climax, the
piece comes to a melodic resolution.

            To communicate through his unusual
musical language, Vu’s knowledge of the trumpet must be augmented by a thorough
understanding of electronic devices.

            “I run [the trumpet] through a
Lexicon mpx100 for some reverb and ambient delay,” he says. “Then I split that
sound into two paths that I send through two separate delay pedals. One is a
Boss DD20 that has 20 seconds of sound-on-sound looping and various other delay
settings. The other is a D.O.D. 4-second delay pedal that also has
sound-on-sound capabilities. They each give me independent loops that I can
layer and take out or change in an improvisatory way.”

            His group’s bassist, Stomu Takeishi,
has his own set of similar devices; only drummer John Hollenback remains
acoustic.

            When Vu writes, he does not employ
traditional forms or even traditional ways of conveying melody and harmony.

            “I just try to come up with ‘songs’
that have a really strong vibe and suggest a direction for the improvisations,”
he says. “Stomu and I have spent a great deal of time talking about our
approach as well as working on it in a really focused way. We have kind of a
set of rules about certain things to help us avoid the potholes of free
improvisation and the meanderings that are inherent in improvised music.”

Vu was born in
Vietnam to a musical family. His father played drums and guitar in a band and later
took up saxophone and trumpet; his mother was a singer.            Vu has only vague memories of Vietnam.

            “We were poor and lived in a
storefront that was a motorcycle-bicycle repair shop,” he says. “The back
portion had a kitchen and the upstairs had two bedrooms. There were eight
people living in it and it was cramped and crude compared to what my living
conditions are today.”

            Vu, his mother, and sister were
among the thousands air-lifted out of Vietnam at the end of the war. His father
stayed behind to take care of his parents.

            “I vaguely remember my dad saying
goodbye. He was filled with this morose sense of sadness that I didn’t
understand,” he says. “Suddenly, I was in a van with some of my relatives going
somewhere. Then I got separated from my mom (but I was with my grandma) as we
boarded the cargo planes. That really freaked me out and I cried like hell. I
remember sitting in the darkness of the plane looking at the American soldiers
in their gear and with their guns. The last thing I remember of that was being
at Camp Pendleton in California.

            “Looking back, the conditions were
really uncomfortable, but at that time, I had a ball. I felt extremely excited,
though I don’t think I knew why. And I have to say — in light of all the
bullshit going on in Iraq with the mistreatment of prisoners and even civilians
— back then the soldiers were really cool. They took care of us, played with
us, gave us chocolates. They set up a big screen and showed Bugs Bunny cartoons
that I loved!”

            Vu and his family ended up in a
house in Redmond, Washington, with four other families.

            “That was a blast!”

            Not long after Vu arrived in the US,
his mother gave him a trumpet.

            “I was excited. I was 7 or 8. Any
kid would be excited to get a shiny, weird, instrument.

            When he was 11 his father arrived
from Vietnam and enrolled him in a school music program.

            “While I loved music and was excited
about participating, I thought that the trumpet was a pretty geeky instrument.
I wanted to play drums or guitar. My dad played the trumpet in Vietnam, and
from his perspective and experience, trumpet players made more money and had
more stable work than drummers and guitarists, so he made me stick with the
trumpet.”

            In high school, Vu joined the big
band and played jazz but he found himself gravitating toward rock-based fusion
with highly skilled soloists who played faster, higher, and louder.

            “The stuff that was the most musical
that I was checking out was the Pat Metheny Group; I loved their records. The
one thing that bothered me back then was that there weren’t enough kick-ass
solos. It’s so funny how incredibly immature I was. I guess I should have been
checking out more Van Halen and AC/DC.”

When it came
to the trumpet, Vu liked Clifford Brown’s The Beginning and the End, especially the solo on “A Night in
Tunisia.” He also remembers liking Clark Terry. Even later, in college, he
didn’t relate to much jazz. But there were exceptions: Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, Kenny Wheeler’s Gnu High, and Lee Morgan’s Sidewinder.

            His mastery of the trumpet was
enough to earn him a full scholarship at the New England Conservatory of Music.
But, he says, he didn’t go there for the right reasons.

            “I went there because people said it
was a great school and it was in Boston where a couple of my friends were
studying,” Vu says. “I just didn’t know specifically what I wanted out of
school and was expecting a school to just make me a good musician and give me
the formula for becoming a good musician.

            “I slowly started to figure it out
by being exposed to a lot of heavy music, specifically from the classical music
courses that I was required to take,” he says.

            At the Conservatory he hooked up
with saxophonist and faculty member Joe Maneri, a pioneering avant-garde
composer and player.

            “I learned a lot about free group
improvisation. The most important thing that he impressed upon me was the
spirit of searching for the unknown,” Vu says. “Just trying to make music
without depending on the musical devices that have been proven, done, and
overdone.”

            After graduating, Vu moved to New
York and established himself in the downtown experimental music scene that
developed around the Knitting Factory. He began to play with different groups
and record his own albums.

            Guitarist Pat Metheny happened to
hear one of these albums on the radio while he was in the middle of putting
together a new band. A few years ago, in an interview, Metheny enthusiastically
recounted the story of trying to find the trumpet player. He said he’d heard
the name Cuong Vu, but had no idea whether it was a group or a person. He asked
around to no avail and then did the last thing he could think of — he looked
in the phone book.

            Vu picks up the story.

            “One day I was practicing and the
phone rings. The answering machine in the next room picked up and I listened
for a moment and heard, ‘My name is… (inaudible)… and I just called to say that
I’m a big fan….’ I started practicing again, thinking, man, this dude has to
stop calling me. I thought it was one of a couple of guys who called me saying
they liked my music and that they were really good musicians and I should hire
them. I didn’t bother listening to the message.

            “Three days later, my girlfriend
came into my practice room and said, ‘Uh… honey… there’s a message for you
from Pat Metheny.’ I thought it was a friend of mine from high school messing
around. But when I listened to it, it sounded like Pat’s voice, so I called him
back and was really excited and freaked. With the direction that I had taken in
the previous seven years or so, I never thought that anyone from that scene,
much less Pat Metheny, would call me. I mean, I’d get it if like Lester Bowie
or Ornette Coleman had called, but Pat Metheny? The next day we met and talked
and played a little bit, and then he asked me if I would audition for his
band.”

            Vu passed the audition, recorded
with the group, and went on tour.

Vu is now
focused on his own music. He’s been compared favorably to Bitches Brew-era­Miles
Davis and has been garnering one rave review after another for taking the
trumpet in a different direction.

            But then, if anyone should know
about changes in direction, it’s Vu. His entire world took a life-changing
detour when he got on that plane from Vietnam.

            Does he ever consider what he’d be
doing if there had been no unrest, no reason to leave Vietnam?

            “I’d be one of three things:
musician, a carpenter, or an auto mechanic. That’s what my dad did,” Vu says.
“I’d probably be poor but wouldn’t mind because I probably wouldn’t know any
better. Beyond that it’s hard to say.”

This article appears in Jun 9-15, 2004.