What We Live

Trumpets puts the San Francisco trio What We Live (Larry Ochs on tenor and sopranino, Lisle Ellis on bass, Donald Robinson on drums) together with two trumpeters, one at a time. Wadada Leo Smith plays on the first two tracks, Dave Douglas on the last three. The pairing grew out of the band's habit of adding one guest to the trio on tour: in Seattle and Vancouver in the autumn of 1996 it became What We Live Four with Douglas, and in November 1998 it toured Europe with Smith. The same format, one guest added to the trio, had also brought Marilyn Crispell on stage with them for a set in Madison. The album followed the trio's own Never Was on Black Saint.

The two halves come from different places and years. The Douglas set was recorded on November 1, 1996 at The Western Front in Vancouver by Peter Courteanche, the Smith set on March 21, 1998 at The Outpost in Albuquerque by Paul Blakemore. Ochs produced, Myles Boisen mixed and mastered, and Francesco Martinelli wrote the notes. The Smith pieces are long and shared, credited to all four players: Second Breath runs twenty minutes and The Stone Heated Distance almost seventeen. With Douglas the tracks are shorter, between nine and eleven minutes, and the label credits him as composer on Orbital, Soft City and Song Of Roland. In his Boston Phoenix piece on the trio, Ed Hazell described What We Live as a group dedicated "to free improvisation in the American vein", rooted in jazz rather than in European practice. Both trumpeters also played together with the trio on Quintet For A Day for New World, which makes this disc its counterpart in separate meetings.

This is the Black Saint CD 120189-2, the album's original 1999 release.