This album brings together Norwegian guitarist Terje Rypdal, Czech bassist Miroslav Vitous and American drummer Jack DeJohnette as a trio of equals, their three names forming the title. It was recorded in Oslo in June 1978 and released by ECM in 1979. The music moves between electric atmospheres and close acoustic interplay. Each member brings material, and two pieces are improvised by all three, so the album sounds like a working band rather than a leader with accompanists.

Rypdal plays guitar, guitar synthesizer and organ, Vitous double bass and electric piano, and DeJohnette drums. The session took place at Talent Studio with engineer Jan Erik Kongshaug, and Manfred Eicher produced. Rypdal had been recording for ECM since the early 1970s, and his previous album for the label was Waves (1978). Vitous, a founding member of Weather Report, contributes two tunes, one of them Will, which he had first recorded with that band on Sweetnighter in 1973. The trio met again in January 1981 for To Be Continued.

Rypdal's two compositions open the record. Sunrise starts on DeJohnette's scurrying drums, with Vitous plucking sparingly while overdubbed guitar lines rise and echo above. In Den Forste Sne (The First Snow) the bass is bowed, and Rypdal's chords move quietly underneath, in a piece that is intimate yet broad in scale. Will is lighter and more lyrical, and Believer gives the guitar a stronger lead. The closing Flight and Seasons, credited to all three, are freer group improvisations of jagged syncopation and scattered detail.

ECM's own note says the guitarist is lifted to new heights by the inventive playing of his partners. It sums the record up in four words: "Cascades of sound prevail." Writing for ECM Reviews, Tyran Grillo argued that the album, though billed as a Rypdal venture, is "primarily a canvas for Vitous." Of Sunrise he wrote that the guitar "dominates here, its trembling accents seeming to grab clouds by their collars."

This CD (ECM 1125) belongs to ECM's Touchstones series, launched in 2008 to bring catalogue albums back in cardboard sleeves; this edition, in a four-panel digisleeve, was issued in October 2008. The album was first released in 1979.