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2000 Knitting Factory Records
*This record is no longer available through Knitting Factory Records. However, a full length CD of Cuong's favorite cuts from both this record and "Come Play With Me" is available as part of Cuong's ArtistShare Project. Click on "This, This, and That" to find out more.
Cuong Vu - trumpet
Stomu Takeishi - bass
John Hollenbeck - drums
Recorded by Sassha von Oertzen at the Knitting Factory, NY, 2000
Mixed and Mastered by Laurent Brondel
Produced by Laurent Brondel and Cuong Vu
This jazz trio album, lead by trumpeter Vu, uses virtuosity, imagination and live electronic manipulations to make a thunderous and wonderful little album of what might be called "free jazz." - Keving O'Toole, wwuh.org
With Pure, Cuong Vu seems to have created the jazz version of a rock music power trio. Just imagine his trumpet as the guitar hero-style lead instrument on this session, meshed with Stomu Takeishi's very obviously electric bass and John Hollenbeck's inventive drumming. That done you can easily think of the three as a very sophisticated version of Rush, Triumph or Z.Z. Top. More seriously, the reason this CD is so impressive is despite -- or perhaps because of -- their power, the trio members are versatile enough to adapt many different musical forms to their own ends.
Take the 17 and 1/2 minute "I Shall Never Come Back," for example. It gradually evolves from a spacey, electronics-tinged trumpet tone exploration to an out-and-out rocker, complete with auditorium shaking drumbeats and Brontosaurus tooth chomping bass rhythm. - Ken Waxman, Jazz Weekly
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Trumpeter Cuong Vu, with the release of his third leader session, has to be counted as one of the major jazz instrumentalists working in the spirit of the best fusion. On Come Play With Me, Vu's raw, breathy tone is shrouded in refracting, misty clouds of echo, delay and feedback, all of which serve to intensify the instrument's essential brassy qualities. The result is something both hard-boiled and dream-like. - Joe Milazzo, onefinalnote.com
It’s pure art. Cuong Vu has dug so deep into himself that the ineluctable ghost of Miles Davis just isn’t an issue, even in an electronically oriented arena like Pure’s, where you’d think that, between 1968 and 1975, Miles did everything that could be done. Drummer John Hollenbeck slugs the toms a lot, plays sparely and with a wide range of volume, uses subtle repetition in a way that you wouldn’t have called a groove till you found yourself stomping your foot on the floor. Bassist Stomu Takeishi, who plucks so busily way up the neck when he’s with Erik Friedlander, completely reinvents himself with Vu, squeezing his mud way down between the beats; mutant loops of his riffs are also used here and there as thematic material. Vu himself is determined to play nothing that’s meaningless. He drones essential planes of sustain, sketches slow minisongs of improvisation one after the other, finds brand-new tonal regions of his horn, sometimes sounding like he’s stuffed his cheeks with popcorn just for the effect it’ll produce. And whoever oversaw the electronic touches (Vu? co-producer Laurent Brondel?) cut them in with diamond precision, using them as accents rather than as ends in themselves.
All are terrific. But at least once, take the full 18 minutes and pay strict attention to “I Shall Never Come Back.” It starts with sparse echoes in an empty room, follows with some truly scary monster-bass effects, cuts loose the drums for an episode of soulless brutality, then ushers in a trumpet passage that reveals everything about anguish and despair in flat, naked beauty before introducing a beat and an echoing finale that can’t represent anything but a man staggering self-pitilessly toward his death. It will shake you. - Greg Burk, LA Weekly
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