This intimate June 1969 musical get-together was due in large extent to the close friendship between the revered guitarist Jim Hall and legendary German writer/critic and producer Joachim-Ernst Berendt. As Hall, his wife and daughter were visiting him in Berlin, Berendt noticed that, although he had been recording extensively with a number of major jazz figures over the last years, including several collaborative get-togethers, Hall had not recorded an album solely under his own name in over a decade. Berendt immediately set up a trio recording for Hall that included two internationally renowned musicians with whom Hall had previously worked, the Afro-American expatriate bassist Jim Woode and Swiss-French drummer Daniel Humair. In such a transparent setting, Hall unfurled his finest qualities. Humair perceptively summed it up: Hall played with "more clarity, more purity, more sensitivity" than any other guitarist of the period. It resulted in an album of intensely introspective music.