Colours collects the three albums that Eberhard Weber's band of that name recorded for ECM: Yellow Fields (1975), Silent Feet (1977) and Little Movements (1980). During its six years Colours was one of the most popular groups on the European jazz circuit, though Weber always kept it at a distance from the jazz mainstream. Its sound grew out of The Colours of Chloë, his 1974 ECM album.

Weber plays his customised electric upright bass, an instrument he pushed to the front of the band rather than keeping it to timekeeping. Charlie Mariano plays soprano saxophone and flutes, and adds the Indian shenai and nagaswaram on the first album. Rainer Brüninghaus is on piano and synthesizer. Jon Christensen drums on Yellow Fields, recorded in September 1975; John Marshall takes over for Silent Feet (November 1977) and Little Movements (July 1980). All three were made at Tonstudio Bauer in Ludwigsburg and produced by Manfred Eicher.

In the liner notes Weber recalls that the Chloë session already held “the reflective European or chamber music side of the writing”, some jazz-rock and “a kind of pictorial play with minimalism”, and that Colours developed all of it. Sand-Glass, over fifteen minutes on Yellow Fields, sets Mariano's shenai against slowly layered harmony. Seriously Deep, which opens Silent Feet, runs nearly eighteen minutes over drones and electric piano before the soprano and the bass take their solos. On Little Movements Brüninghaus contributes Bali, built on a drone and a steady pulse from Marshall and Weber.

Reviewing the box in The Guardian, John Fordham picked Yellow Fields as the best of the three and wrote that “Colours was a landmark band, and if some of this music sounds familiar, it's because its impact was widespread”. Garry Booth in BBC Music Magazine heard “the essence of runic North European jazz”. In Jazzwise, Stuart Nicholson pointed to the range of the band, which looked well beyond Europe through Mariano's double-reed instruments.

This is the 3-CD box in ECM's Old & New Masters series, which gathers earlier albums of an artist or group in one set. Catalogued ECM 2133-35 on ECM Records, it came out on 6 November 2009, the day Weber received the German Jazz Award/Albert Mangelsdorff Prize in Berlin, with a 32-page booklet and liner notes by Michael Tucker.