[1] Born to Chinese[2] parents in Paris, he was regarded as a child prodigy there and began to study the cello with his father at age four.

At the age of seven, Ma moved with his family to Boston and later to New York City, where he continued his cello studies at the Juilliard School before pursuing a liberal arts education at Harvard University.

He has also collaborated with artists from a diverse range of genres, including Bobby McFerrin, Carlos Santana, Chris Botti, Diana Krall, James Taylor, Miley Cyrus, Zakir Hussain, and Sting.

Ma's sister, Ya tong sang, played the viola and piano professionally before obtaining a medical degree from Harvard and becoming a pediatrician.

When three-year-old Yo-Yo said he wanted a big instrument, his father went to see Etienne Vatelot, a foremost violin maker in Paris who, after a chat, lent him a 1/16th cello.

In 1964, Isaac Stern introduced them on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, and they performed the Sonata of Sammartini.

In addition to his prolific musical career, Ma collaborated in 1999 with landscape architects to design a Bach-inspired garden.

1 in G Major for unaccompanied cello (BWV 1007), where the garden's sections were designed to correspond with the suite's dance movements.

[19] Toronto enthusiastically embraced the design, originally planned for Boston, and it was subsequently built in the Harbourfront neighborhood.

[23] His music was featured in the 2010 documentary Jews and Baseball: An American Love Story, narrated by Academy Award winner Dustin Hoffman.

[31] Ma formed his own collective, the Silk Road Ensemble, named after the route across Asia which for more than 2,000 years was used for trade between Europe and China.

He also founded the Silk Road Connect, an educational pilot program for children from middle schools in the United States, including New York City.

[34] In addition to numerous recordings of the standard classical repertoire, he has recorded Baroque pieces using period instruments; American bluegrass music; traditional Chinese melodies, including the soundtrack to the film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; the tangos of Argentinian composer Astor Piazzolla; Brazilian music, recording traditional and contemporary songs composed by Antônio Carlos Jobim and Pixinguinha; a collaboration with Bobby McFerrin (where Ma admitted to being terrified by McFerrin's improvisation); and the music of modern minimalist Philip Glass, in such works as the 2002 Naqoyqatsi.

[39] That year, when its neck was damaged during X-ray baggage inspection, he borrowed the Pawle Stradivarius cello from the Chimei Museum for a concert in Taiwan.

He was the first performer on September 11, 2002, at the site of the World Trade Center, while the first of the names of the dead were read on the first anniversary of the attack on the WTC; he played the Sarabande from Bach's Cello Suite #5 in C Minor.

He performed John Williams's "Air and Simple Gifts" at the first inauguration of Barack Obama on January 20, 2009, along with Itzhak Perlman (violin), Gabriela Montero (piano), and Anthony McGill (clarinet).

"[47] On May 3, 2009, Ma performed the world premiere of Bruce Adolphe's "Self Comes to Mind" for solo cello and two percussionists with John Ferrari and Ayano Kataoka at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.

The work is based on a poetic description written for the composer of the evolution of brain into mind by neuroscientist Antonio Damasio.

[48] On October 3, 2009, Ma appeared with Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper at the National Arts Centre gala in Ottawa.

Harper, a fan of The Beatles, played the piano and sang a rendition of "With a Little Help from My Friends" while Ma accompanied him on cello.

[49] In 2011, Ma performed with American dancer Charles "Lil Buck" Riley in the United States and in China at the U.S.-China Forum on the Arts and Culture.

[50] On April 18, 2013, he performed at an interfaith service to honor the victims of the Boston Marathon bombing, held at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross, where he played the Sarabande from Bach's Cello Suite No.

[51] On September 9, 2015, Ma performed all six of Bach's cello suites at the Royal Albert Hall (London) as part of the BBC Proms season.

The audience of around 17,000 also heard him play an encore, a tribute to "cellist Pablo Casals, who as a 13-year-old in 1890 discovered an old copy of the Bach suites in a secondhand music store, bringing them to modern attention.

On June 20, 2019, Ma performed the Bach Complete Cello Suites at Jay Pritzker Pavilion in Chicago, Illinois.

The free performance attracted what might have been his largest audience, with a pavilion capacity of 11,000, and many thousands more listening from surrounding Millennium Park.

[55][56] In March 2021, Ma played "Ave Maria" in an impromptu waiting room concert, after receiving his second dose of a COVID-19 vaccine at Berkshire Community College in Massachusetts.

[62] He was also one of the show's guests on November 1, 2011, where he performed songs from the album The Goat Rodeo Sessions with musicians Stuart Duncan, Edgar Meyer and Chris Thile.

[73] According to research presented by Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. for the PBS series Faces of America, a relative hid the Ma family genealogy in his home in China to save it from destruction during the Cultural Revolution.