On the Wing is a ten-part instrumental suite by the German multi-instrumentalist Stephan Micus, released by ECM in August 2006. Micus is the only musician on it, building each piece through multitrack recording from instruments of Asia, the Middle East and Europe that never meet in their own traditions. After Life (2004), a vocal work built around a Japanese Buddhist koan, this record lets breath do the singing: reeds and flutes lead almost every track.
Micus first travelled to Asia at sixteen, and he learns his instruments from players in the places they come from. The palette here is unusually wide. There is the Iraqi mudbesh and the Burmese hné, both double-reed instruments, the Egyptian nay, the Balinese suling and the Japanese sho and shakuhachi. The sattar, a bowed instrument of the Uyghurs of western China, carries much of the harmony. Around it sit the mandobahar, a rare Indian bass lute, a sitar, guitars, the Swiss hang and Asian gongs and cymbals. The album was recorded between 2003 and 2006 at MCM Studios, and the cover photograph is by Claudine Doury.
Most pieces are small, multiplied ensembles of one or two instrument types. Winterlight is scored for three sattar alone, a slow, frosted drone with an almost medieval cast. In Ancient Trees six shakuhachi provide the ground while two sattar and four mandobahar move over it. Two longer pieces open the scale. The Bride gathers gongs, hang, guitars, mudbesh and shakuhachi into the record's fullest texture, while Turquoise Fields combines steel-string guitars with hné, suling, sattar and nay. Between them, The Gate is a bare sitar solo, and the suite closes with Morning Sky for five hné.
Critics stressed the seriousness behind the sound. In The Australian, Michael Rofe wrote that the album "is a world away from anything remotely New Age". In Jazzpodium, Ulrich Steinmetzger rejected the idea of sound tourism. He heard instead the almost monastic search of a man obsessed with the world, with results both fragile and melancholic. Pirmin Bossart of Jazz'n'More noted how Micus lifts instruments out of their original context and links them in new ways, creating sound worlds with a cultivated archaic quality.
This is the CD edition, ECM 1987, first released on 29 August 2006, in a jewel case with a 16-page booklet and an outer O-card.
