A Note About Morning Sky

I've added this page because this LP is quite possibly the single most frequent topic of emails I've had about this site (closely followed by "Where can I get a copy of Cadmium / Great Balloon Race ?").

Ordinarily, I wouldn't bother including an item on this record here, but Morning Sky is a curiosity which confuses many people, for several perfectly valid reasons. The title, presentation, typography and "cast list" make such confusion perfectly understandable, hence this attempt at an explanation. What follows is the text of the standard reply I've always sent to queries about it.

It's only indirectly related to Sky (but it is related, which is why I'm even bothering to include it here). Morning Sky is a selection of tracks from two John Williams Jazz/pop LPs, Changes and The Height Below (released in 1971 and 1973 respectively). The A side of Morning Sky is principally the A side of The Height Below, although for some reason in a different order).

These recordings featured John Williams playing with a panoply of the major session musicians working in London at the time and it was during the recording of a third album made in the same circumstances (called Travelling, 1978) that the idea for forming Sky was born. The names you can see on the top of the LP cover above could indeed have included Tristan Fry and Francis Monkman as well (Francis Monkman wrote the title track for Travelling).

I'm not actually sure when Morning Sky came out - I've never had a copy of the actual LP in my hands but I do have a copy of the sleeve and it bears no mention of the publication date (although it does give the dates of the original recordings). I assume that it came out after the first Sky LP was released in 1979 - here in the UK, several compilations of the 1971 and 1973 recordings came out although for some reason Morning Sky wasn't one of them (then again, to my knowledge, the UK ones, Bridges, Cavatina, Spotlight on John Williams and Replay weren't released elsewhere). Coincidentally, a single of Cavatina (the recording which appeared on Changes) became a big hit over here at that time as a result of its use in The Deer Hunter so interest in John Williams came from two directions.

As for rarity/value, Morning Sky was produced in massive quantities by a budget label - like the compilations here in the UK - and are considered neither rare nor valuable - this is the usual status of compilations.

Even the original LPs: Changes, The Height Below and Travelling, aren't considered rare or valuable and change hands for pennies.