"Morning" was Fischer's first - and, to this day, his most famous - contribution to the then recently evolved cha-cha-chá genre.
In practice, however, the song's debut recording does take one significant detour, paying unashamed homage to one of its composer's primary musical influences in the process, when, halfway through trombonist Gil Falco's solo, instead of proceeding to the bridge, "Morning" morphs into a 16-bar development of the principal 2-measure motif of "Spring Rounds," the fourth section from Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring.
Long before that, however, he had been upstaged, at least throughout the Spanish-speaking world, by Mexican singer José José's eponymous 1969 debut LP, which featured a "Morning" cover under the title "Una mañana" ("One morning") with Spanish lyrics written by Joaquín Prieto.
[6] Head start aside, the magnitude of José's stardom all but guaranteed that any Spanish-language version supplied by the composer was doomed to obscurity, a situation still lamented by Fischer almost thirty years later.
[7] Fischer's own lyrics, however, have - at least in their original language - gained some traction since their 1981 debut in Clare Fischer & Salsa Picante Present 2+2, with subsequent recordings by Lisa Rich,[8] Meredith D'Ambrosio,[9] Jeanie Bryson,[10] Dianne Reeves,[11] Alex & Nilusha,[12] and, most recently, on Roseanna Vitro's album Clarity, Music of Clare Fischer.