Trio Music brought Chick Corea, Miroslav Vitous and Roy Haynes back together thirteen years after Now He Sings, Now He Sobs, the 1968 album that made their trio one of the reference points of modern jazz piano. Issued by ECM in 1982 as a double album, it is split in two clear halves: a set of free improvisations for trio and duo, followed by seven pieces by Thelonious Monk.

The music was recorded in November 1981 at Mad Hatter Studios in Los Angeles, with Bernie Kirsh as engineer, and mixed by Martin Wieland at Tonstudio Bauer in Ludwigsburg. Manfred Eicher produced, and Corea wrote the liner notes. For Corea it was a return to the label that had released his solo Piano Improvisations and his duets with Gary Burton in the early 1970s. Vitous, by then an ECM artist in his own right, plays double bass, and Haynes is on drums.

The first part holds five short trio improvisations, each between three and eight minutes, and two duets in which Corea and Vitous play without drums. All are credited jointly to the players. Corea's own theme Slippery When Wet closes this half and leads into the Monk set, which mixes medium and fast tunes such as Rhythm-a-Ning, Eronel, Little Rootie Tootie and Hackensack with two ballads, 'Round Midnight and Reflections. 'Round Midnight is credited, as usual, to Monk and Cootie Williams; every other tune in the set is Monk's alone, tunes he wrote between the mid-1940s and the late 1950s.

At AllMusic, Scott Yanow found the improvised half a little lightweight at times, but felt the Monk half succeeds because Corea honours Monk's spirit while keeping his own personality. Reviewing the album for the BBC, Peter Marsh wrote that "the trio setting is a sympathetic frame for Corea's pianistic talents". The same three musicians returned to ECM with Trio Music, Live in Europe, released in 1986.

This 2002 CD edition of ECM 1232/33 presents the complete original double album, first released on 4 October 1982, on a single disc, keeping the two-part running order of the original LPs.