In August 1981 the Molde Jazz Festival gave Arild Andersen the freedom to put together a group of his own choice, and the Norwegian bassist assembled a quartet that played just this one concert. Bill Frisell, then still little known, played guitar, the English pianist John Taylor was on piano, and the drummer was Alphonse Mouzon, a member of the first Weather Report. Molde Concert documents that night, mostly through Andersen's own compositions, and this CD presents it in a much fuller form than the original LP.

The set was recorded live at the festival in Molde, on the Norwegian west coast, by engineer Tore Skille, with Johs Bergh supervising the recording. ECM first issued it in 1982 as a single LP, titled A Molde Concert. For the CD reissue of 2000 the label added more than twenty minutes of previously unreleased music and restored the order in which the pieces were played on stage. The result runs to nearly eighty minutes and eleven tracks.

The centre of the concert is The Sword Under His Wings, more than thirteen minutes long, where the leader's own bass playing comes forward, and it follows Lifelines, a piece Andersen wrote with the singer Radka Toneff. Six for Alphonse is dedicated by its title to the drummer, while Commander Schmuck's Earflap Hat leaves room for Taylor's long, searching piano lines. The set ends with Dual Mr. Tillman Anthony, a theme from the Miles Davis book named after Tony Williams and first heard on Davis's 1976 album Water Babies, where it had been recorded without guitar in 1968.

Reviewing the original LP in Jazz Journal in February 1983, Barry McRae observed that despite "limited rehearsal, the group manages to become highly integrated". He also noticed a paradox of the line-up: "the most European sounding musician on parade is American Bill Frisell". The guitarist would go on to record for ECM with Andersen's colleagues Jan Garbarek and Eberhard Weber, and under his own name, in the years that followed.

This is the 2000 CD edition of ECM 1236, in a card slipcase, expanded from the album first released on 4 October 1982.