Achirana introduced a new trio formed by the Norwegian bassist Arild Andersen with the British drummer John Marshall. At the piano is the Greek Vassilis Tsabropoulos, here making his first recording for ECM. Tsabropoulos was already known as a classical pianist, conductor and composer, and the album showed him as an improviser of real independence. The programme is entirely original and, in ECM's words, casts new light on the post-Bill Evans idiom.

The album was recorded in October 1999 at Rainbow Studio, Oslo, produced by Manfred Eicher and engineered by Jan Erik Kongshaug. Andersen, an ECM bassist since the label's first years with the Jan Garbarek Trio, first met Tsabropoulos in Athens while playing in Greece with Markus Stockhausen. What struck him, he told ECM, was that the pianist's classical technique "never got in the way of his jazz feeling", and that his improvising was rarely chord-based. A chance meeting with Eicher in an Athens street led to the project. Marshall had played in Eberhard Weber's band Colours and, before that, in Soft Machine.

The two opening pieces, the title track and Diamond Cut Diamond, are credited to all three players. They begin sparely, with pointillist piano and slowly thickening bass, before the record moves on to lighter, swinging material. Andersen's Valley follows in the same unhurried mood, and the rest of the programme is mostly by Tsabropoulos. The Spell, at over ten minutes the longest piece, and Fable are the most expansive of his themes, while Andersen's She's Gone gives the bassist room for an extended solo.

The album was a Pick of the Month in BBC Music Magazine. There Ian Carr called Tsabropoulos "the first classical pianist I've ever heard who can play jazz with real understanding and great imagination". In The Times, Mike Bradley pointed to "the fearlessly slow gems" Diamond Cut Diamond and Valley. The German magazine Audio made it CD of the month. The trio returned to the studio for a second album, The Triangle.

This CD is the 2022 reissue in ECM's Touchstones series, which brings catalogue albums back into print in card packaging. Achirana was first released in 2000 as ECM 1728.