Jazz music is like that old quote about never stepping in the same river twice.

The water is always flowing, so even if you step in two times on the same day, it’s not the same water.

And neither is jazz. You can get the same three musicians together to conjure up a cover of a familiar tune, but every time will be different.

When the Cuong Vu Jazz Trio, with Grammy Award-winning trumpet player Vu, bassist Stomu Takeishi and drummer Ted Poor, reunites for the first time in 18 months, they’ll be different people than when they last played. And the jazz they make will be ephemeral, never to be quite the same again. The show is Thursday at Ent Center for the Arts.

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“Each of us brings our composer tendencies and we’re totally trusting of each other that we can compose things together,” Vu said from home in Seattle. “I know what they’re able to do. We’re figuring it out on the spot.”

Vu, a music professor at the University of Washington, wasn’t always keen on his instrument. The family moved from Saigon, Vietnam, when he was 6 and at 11 he told his mom he wanted to play the same horn as his multi-instrumentalist father, only he didn’t know what it was. She brought a trumpet home, but it didn’t win him over until much later.

“I hated the trumpet for the longest time,” Vu said. “I wanted to play drums, guitar and sing. Finally I said OK, I’ll play this goofy instrument.”

It changed during his time at the New England Conservatory of Music. He discovered the freedom to play whatever genre of music intrigued him. And after an adviser urged him to define what he wanted to contribute to the world through his trumpet and music, how and what he played changed.

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“It isn’t the instrument anymore, it happens to be the device I’m interfacing with music through,” Vu said.

“All of us can get to a stage where the instrument isn’t important anymore. If I were able to suddenly play banjo I’m going to sound like me on banjo. I’d still be the same person, thinking and feeling the same way and putting forth my personality. That doesn’t change. My personality comes through my music.”

After college, in 1994, he moved to New York City where he got more into avant-garde and classical contemporary music. One day he came home to a message on his answering machine from Grammy Award-winning jazz guitarist and composer Pat Metheny telling Vu he’d heard some of his records and to give him a call.

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Vu, a huge fan of Metheny since high school, first thought it was a joke. It wasn’t. He went on to audition and play with the Pat Metheny Group for about six years, during which they won two Grammys in 2002 and 2006. Vu now has eight albums to his name and has performed with a long list of nationally and internationally known musicians, including David Bowie and Laurie Anderson.

“The voracious sweep of postmillennial jazz has plenty of exemplars, but few truer than the trumpeter Cuong Vu,” wrote critic Nate Chinen for The New York Times in 2011. “Over the last decade he has upheld a dreamlike sound informed by post-bop but just as rooted in noise pop, grunge and ambient minimalism. He has an invaluable partner in the bassist Stomu Takeishi, who shares his fluency with electronics and his fondness for immersive lyricism. Together with the smart young drummer Ted Poor they have tended to an aquatic, darkly inviting, calmly exploratory style.”

Contact the writer: 636-0270