This musician's reputation and flexibility is evidenced by his decades-long partnership with jazz star Pat Metheny, collaborations with the legendary Laurie Anderson and David Bowie, and the most prominent representatives of today's avant-garde jazz.The inventive trumpet innovator cannot be pigeonholed into the standard framework of musical genres and styles. He created his own aesthetics and sound of the instrument, managed to avoid even the influence of Miles Davis, which imprisoned many trumpet players.
Cuong Vu has gained recognition for live concerts and recordings with his trio and quartet featuring bassist Stomu Takeishi and today's top drummers, projects with luminaries of various musical genres.Born in Vietnam to a pop singer and multi-instrumentalist, Vu immigrated to the United States with his mother and settled in Seattle at the age of six. At first he was attracted to his father's instrument, the saxophone, and the boy started playing the trumpet at eleven. The trumpeter completed his jazz studies at Boston's New England Conservatory of Music under Joe Maneri, who strongly influenced him.
Vu later moved to New York where he began playing with Dave Douglas, Bobby Previte, Chris Speed, Andy Laster, Jamie Saft and Gerry Hemingway. He was also a member of drummer George Schuller's Orange Then Blue Big Band and Jeff Song's Lowbrow, fronted his own bands Scratcher and Vu-Tet, and fronted three back-to-back albums, Bound, Pure and Come Play with Me. The latter was ranked by Amazon as one of the 100 best jazz albums of all time.
Vu began performing to huge audiences after becoming a member of Mr. Metheny's band. The trumpeter toured intensively with her, recorded the albums "Speaking of Now" (2002) and "Way Up" (2005), which won the "Grammy" in the contemporary jazz category. Around the same time, Vu joined Ms. Melford's quintet and released her fourth album, Mostly Residual, which featured guitar luminary Bill Frisell.
After that, the trumpet player dived into pedagogy - he became an assistant professor of jazz studies at Seattle University, where he also distinguished himself: he was awarded the meritorious teacher award for his creative work with students. One of his former students was immortalized with the Vu Quartet on the Leaps of Faith album.
The trumpeter later collaborated with multi-instrumentalist Eyvind Kang and the Italian jazz trio Wasabi. In recent years, his focus has been on working with his own groups."Classic CD" magazine included VU in the list of the best 50 jazz creators, and the Italian Jazz Critics Association chose him as the Best Foreign Musician in 2006.
