Standards, Vol. 1 is the record that began the long life of the trio of Keith Jarrett, Gary Peacock and Jack DeJohnette, one of the best-loved bands in jazz. The three had played together once before, on Peacock's Tales of Another in 1977. Here Jarrett turned to the Great American Songbook, with a simple premise: treat the standards as compositions and find out where the material can lead an improviser.

The album was recorded at the Power Station in New York in January 1983, with Manfred Eicher producing and Jan Erik Kongshaug as engineer. ECM recalls that the idea was a modest one, simply to make an album of jazz standards. The trio recorded and mixed enough music for three albums in two and a half days, and the same sessions also produced Standards, Vol. 2 and Changes. In Peacock's own words, quoted by ECM, "We went in to do just one album but we came out with enough material for three albums."

Five songs fill the record. Meaning of the Blues, by Bobby Troup and Leah Worth, opens it at an unhurried pace, Jarrett stating the melody over a gently widening pulse. All the Things You Are is fast and wildly inventive, with Peacock moving nimbly under the Kern changes. Rodgers and Hart's It Never Entered My Mind becomes a heart-rending ballad. The closing God Bless the Child stretches over fifteen minutes. The trio settles into a long groove that keeps building, with Peacock's bass at the centre of it.

The first reactions were not unanimous. Reviewing the LP for Jazz Journal in January 1984, Simon Adams found some tracks less convincing. He singled out God Bless the Child for "the hypnotic effect achieved by the trio as the piece builds to a climax". Looking back on the whole project, Chris Ingham wrote in Mojo that the first sessions "produced three albums of intense, lyrical, faintly histrionic trio jazz".

CD, ECM 1255, first released in 1983 and reissued in 2019 in the Touchstones series. ECM began this line of catalogue reissues in card sleeves in 2008 and extended it for its fiftieth anniversary.