Cuong Vu: Cuong Vu Trio Meets Pat Metheny / Pat Metheny: The Unity Sessions

Trumpeter Cuong Vu is the real deal on so many levels that fans of great music should all know his name. He hasn’t been shy about getting it out there—he has, after all, been playing, recording, and touring with Pat Metheny for nearly 15 years. He played an integral role in dozens of amazing albums beginning in the mid-1990s with leading figures from New York and the Upper Northwest, including Bobby Previte, Laurie Anderson, Chris Speed, Dave Douglas, and Myra Melford.

It was Vu’s masterful 2000 debut, Bound, that made me start following him carefully, and he credits his vocals on that record with “tipping the scale” in getting him the gig with The Pat Metheny Group, where he plays and sings.

That Vu has played for so long with Metheny—and features the popular guitarist on his latest recording, Coung Vu Trio Meets Pat Metheny—tell us many great things about both musicians. Metheny may not be the best-selling jazz instrumentalist of the last 40 years, but he is certainly the most popular jazz player who regularly ventures into experimentation. Metheny can be daring but also as melodically appealing as a pop-jazz figure, and in Vu he found a musician who similarly understands the way that acid can be mixed with sweetness, or vice versa.

Last month, Nonesuch (Metheny’s current label) released Vu’s record on the same day as the latest from his employer, a two-disc set of recordings by the guitarist’s Unity Band.

Coung Vu Trio Meets Pat Metheny

Vu’s most reliable outfit over the years has been a trio featuring Stomu Takeishi on bass and Ted Poor (or, earlier, Jim Black) on drums. Takeishi, who plays a five-string electric or acoustic bass guitar, is a master of much more than a walking bass line. Using technique and some creative pedal magic, he generates a remarkably orchestral webbing of sound beneath Vu’s melodies. This combines with Poor’s tumbling, Elvin Jones-ish percussion and a trumpet approach from Vu that also has texture in mind.

For example, about five minutes into “Telescope” on the new record, you can hear Takeiship furiously strumming his bass and Vu playing a gurgling growl on trumpet such that the band sounds at least ten-men-strong. The overall effect is a band that does not really need a chording instrument such as a piano or guitar.

In the past, then, the trio has successfully welcomed front line partners such as reed specialist Chris Speed. On Bound they were supplemented by keyboardist Jamie Saft, who mostly provided an overdriven Rhodes sound that reminded us that Vu was an early re-discoverer of the sublime beauty of the Miles Davis electric bands of the 1970-75 period. And the new encounter with Pat Metheny—perhaps to folks’ surprise—is in that vein.

Pat Metheny comes on board with the trio as a versatile partner, sometimes acting like Chris Speed or another front line “horn” beside Vu as a melodic foil and sometimes playing the role of Saft, adding chordal accompaniment that is definitely not about playing the changes in a pretty, ornamental way. The result is a Coung Vu/Pat Metheny record that sounds, properly, like it was made on Vu’s terms and in which Metheny was an excited and equal (and equally daring) partner.

In some cases, the band plays like the classic Ornette Coleman quartet, with guitar and trumpet playing together on a knotty little blues (“Tune Blues”) and then letting each player improvise over a loose, lazy stroll by Poor and Takeishi. Metheny uses a variant of his guitar synthesizer here, and I can honestly say that it is the first time I’ve been fully in love with this sound. It allows him to bend his tone further than usual in slow, amazing slurs that mimic Vu’s ability to make his trumpet sound like the human voice. Both soloists take their time, letting notes rises and fall in beautifully controlled smears and then bobbing and dancing like they are utterly at ease.

Other tunes are more gorgeously expressionistic, like the Miles-ian “Acid Kiss”. The trio starts it off, working with a slight echo on the trumpet and bass, muttering and musing before we hear the first of their guest: a bit of wah, then some synthesized distortion, then what seems like feedback. And this is Pat Metheny. As the intensity increases, he enters with the guitar synth, rising into a sharp wall of sound next to Vu’s trumpet, in harmony, in unison, in counterpoint, until the leader gives way to a blues-drenched solo that rips upward in cliffs of sound.

Not that Metheny eschews his classic chorused guitar sound on the album. The ballad “Seeds of Doubt” puts trumpet and guitar in telepathic unison, leading to a Metheny solo that is as lyrical as anything he has ever recorded. “Not Crazy (Just Giddy Upping)” is popping, with a syncopated line that uses the same unison at a fast tempo, and it goads the two main soloists into a pair of solos that delight: Metheny tap dancing like a drunk bopper and Vu using tonal variation to build a great wipe of wind, squeezed upward.

For me, “Tiny Little Pieces” is the set’s masterpiece, with these four musicians sounding utterly orchestral. Metheny provides a sonic backdrop to the trumpet theme and improvisation that could be five guitars at once, reaching for a thousand different sounds, all appropriate. At the midpoint of ten minutes, Vu’s raspiest tone finds a blowsy unison with Methane’s expressive guitar synth, and then the guitarist rises into a solo that ups the energy consistently, Poor stoking the fire, until the whole band is back in and ends it on a bed of scraping noise. Vu woooooo!

The Unity Sessions

The simultaneous release from Metheny is a double-disc that features the guitarist’s recent band of all-stars: Chris Potter on saxophone, Ben Williams on bass, Antonio Sanchez on drums, and Giuilio Carmassi playing several instruments as necessary—with a dose of Metheny’s electro-mechanical “Orchestrion” on many tracks as well. There is exploration in this band, too, but this is a group that places each beautiful voice in a cleaner kind of flight. There are risks aplenty, for example, on the Potter/Metheny duet on the standard, “Cherokee”, as if two tightrope walkers were playing leapfrog across the slackwire. A different soloist is “on top” from bar to bar, and it astonishes.

Mostly, though, the band makes beautiful music that avoids risks even as it dazzles. At its craziest, the band touches the vibe of the Vu record on “Genealogy”, but the wild collective improvisation lasts only a minute before the lead comes in to focus us, and then it’s over in 2:05. Still, a ballad lifted up by a Latin groove such as “Sign of the Season” produces a radiance and pulse that makes the improvising feel great. Potter solos here on soprano saxophone, and he affirms that he is the most interesting “perfect player” out there: never automatic or easy even when he sounds like gleaming silver. Even Williams gets a solo here, woody and lovely over what sounds like a set of swelling strings.

The wonders on Unity Sessions are around most corners. The “sessions” were recorded live in a theater and filmed, but with no audience, at the end of the band’s tour. The playing is road tough and leans on the previous two “Unity” records, but with forays into the Metheny back catalog. For me, hearing the old “Two Folk Songs” from the 80/81 album can’t be beat. Williams solos first, but when Potter takes over and Sanchez starts putting propane into his accompaniment, it’s an explosion of joy that oozes beyond simple tonality. What a gas. “Police People”, which is a tune from Metheny’s landmark recording Song X with Ornette Coleman, is just as joyous, with Sanchez taking the only solo with magician hands.

Material that was written for this group sounds great here. “Rise Up” begins with Metheny strumming in flamenco joy against the band that the Orchestrion, and that mechanical gizmo has never sounded better, with Potter’s soprano outlining a crisp edge of melody. When the tune simmers down into a ballad, Metheny’s lyrical guitar carves a different line that leads the band into a funky but skipping groove in 6/8 time. “Roofdogs” creates a similar groove, but it gets the guitar synth up on the lead. Maybe I’m getting soft, but Williams’ bass line here is so authentic and funky that I’m cool with the synth sound, even without Cuong Vu on hand to make it sound badass.

If you want to understand this band’s ultimate aesthetic, the track to really pull apart is “On Day One”, a 15-minute epic that nimbly moves from one time signature and one time “feel” to another—11/8 becomes 8/8, world music groove becomes samba, Orchestrion chiming turns into guitar blues, moments of Steely Dan-like stop-time precision moves into a bass solo that has a dreamy Jaco Pastorius quality. Some listeners will be tempted to hear it as cheesy or too cinematic, but I hear as more of a kaleidoscope that insists on pleasing me.

For Metheny fans who prefer to avoid that much dazzle, there are quiet moments that still bring you a shiver. “This Belongs to You” is a harmonic wonder of a ballad, with Potter’s tenor and the leader’s acoustic guitar in loving sync, leading to a slowly funky bossa nova section. “Born” is a slow, minor dirge with a gospel underpinning, and the languorous improvising is so canny that it seems okay when the tune ends in a unison section that almost blows the roof off things before Williams is back with that slow groove in chill mode.

The first disc ends with the solo acoustic guitar “Medley” that is just that, with the leader moving through beautiful themes of his that go back as far as his earliest recoding. It may astonish you how easily each tune fits itself into your ear and aural memory. It is as if Pat Metheny—certainly our most lasting jazz star at this point, with a career that goes back to 1976, making this his 40th year making this music—is reminding us that his catalog is formidable. Sure, some of his stuff is kind of pop/lite jazz, but so much of it built on what you have to respect: memorable melody, harmonic nuance, rhythmic momentum, and a unique instrumental voice.

Quietly but with a consistent success (commercial and critical), Pat Metheny has made good music that surges often into the great. And 40 years after Bright Size Life, it has become impossible not to admire his range, his passion, and his accomplishment.