A Visit With Cello Legend Yo-Yo Ma

Cellist Yo-Yo Ma at Here & Now’s studios at WBUR in Boston. (Jesse Costa/Here & Now)

Cellist Yo-Yo Ma has won more than a dozen Grammy awards for his performances of Bach, Brahms and Beethoven.

But this year, he’s nominated for Best Folk Album for “The Goat Rodeo Sessions,” his collaboration with mandolin player Chris Thile, violinist Stuart Duncan and bassist Edgar Meyer.

As Yo-Yo Ma told Here & Now’s Robin Young last April, he was pleased to hear the album being described as a “genre-proof” kind of music.

“It’s what I think good music is – it’s always an amalgam of different things,” he said. “It obviously has classical elements in it, it has bluegrass elements in it, but really, what it is, is the four of us. It’s the chemistry between four people who really like one another, really want to work together, and it’s the product of many years of friendship.”

We revisit the conversation we had with Yo Yo Ma last April.

• Read & listen to the original piece
  

Yo-Yo Ma performs Adnan Saygun’s ‘Partita’ in the WBUR studios:

Guest:

• Yo-Yo Ma, cello player. He also founded the Silk Road project and he works with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Citizen Musician project.