Renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma is respected the world over for his virtuosity, musicianship, and impassioned playing, but it’s his selflessness that truly sets him apart. Simply put, Ma is one of the most generous performers around. To wit: in October 2009, he took a back seat—a back seat!—to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, accompanying the Conservative party leader’s surprise performance of the Beatles’ “With a Little Help From My Friends” at the National Arts Centre.

“You know, he plays good piano,” the genial Ma recalls in conversation with the Straight from his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It’s safe to say that Ma, who has also performed with former U.S. secretary of state Condoleezza Rice (an accomplished amateur pianist herself)—as well as undergone the Stephen Colbert treatment—isn’t one to abide by conventional musical boundaries. In addition to gamely accommodating the whims of politicians, he’s played with vocalist Bobby McFerrin, banjo virtuoso Béla Fleck, and ukulele phenom Jake Shimabukuro, among many artists from various musical disciplines.

Ma’s most enduring collaboration, however, is the Silk Road Ensemble, which plays the Orpheum Theatre this weekend in a Vancouver Recital Society presentation. Established in 1998, the group is a loose collective of about 60 musicians whose mission is to promote the exchange of musical and artistic ideas between different cultures along the historical trade routes linking Asia to Europe and the New World. More than just a performance group, the project has grown into a nonprofit arts and educational organization, the Silk Road Project, of which the ensemble is just one element.

When he’s asked about his motivation for creating the organization, Ma, who graduated from Harvard in 1977 with a bachelor of arts in humanities, reveals his interest in history. “I don’t know if you remember the ’80s,” he begins, his words rushing out in a stream of ideas, “when huge changes were happening in the world, both in terms of the knowledge sector—the information revolution, technology, which sort of collapses distances—but also at that time, we had almost 16 new countries come into existence because the Soviet Union kind of dissolved. Suddenly, new countries emerged, the Berlin Wall fell. So things that we thought were kind of going to be part of our lives forever suddenly changed. So how do we meet the needs of a new world? All of those things, and obviously my deep interest in people and culture, sort of evolved into what became the Silk Road Project. Essentially, it’s finding unbelievably talented, generous people who were sort of standard-bearers in owning their traditions, but who really wanted to be participants in our larger world.”

And finding those people, when you’re as open and plugged into the music scene as Ma is, requires little more than calling in some modest favours. “You know what happens when you travel—coincidences multiply,” he explains. “So you ask a connected person, you know, ”˜Would you mind scouring central Asia? Would you mind scouring through Mongolia or China?’ And lo and behold, you know, they come back and say, ”˜I found these unbelievable people,’ and then we meet and we try to do things together. We commission works, we create works, we work together, we learn each other’s traditions. We become friends, we go to each other’s countries, we visit each other’s families, and that’s how it’s evolved over the last 12 years.”

This weekend, Ma will be joined by 13 of his Silk Road friends on the Orpheum stage, performing on instruments ranging from the Japanese shakuhachi (flute) and the Middle Eastern oud (lute) to the more familiar viola and cello. The eclectic program features the premiere of U.S. composer Gabriela Lena Frank’s ¡Chayraq!: Rough Guide to a Modern Day Tawantinsuyu and a performance of Argentine composer Osvaldo Golijov’s Air to Air, among other works.

Exploring and amalgamating art from cultures that span the globe has, insists Ma, given him a broader perspective on the musical canon. “I feel, in my head, a much better linear narrative of music,” he says. “I think, in a way, what ties the Silk Road idea—all the cultures between the Mediterranean and the Pacific and the developments that led to the discovery of the two Americas—has something to do with how, now with the Internet, we really have a different view of collapsing time and geographic distances into an ever-present now.”¦I think the intent of creating the Silk Road Project is to kind of update our own cultures and say, ”˜These are communities today, the way people are, and this becomes the music of our era.’ As opposed to, ”˜This is classical music from France, or somewhere in Italy, or Appalachian music from West Virginia.’ Actually, you can look at larger swaths of time without diminishing the specificity of content. We honour the specificity, but we actually show the links.”

Ma is endlessly enthusiastic and energetic about the musicians of the Silk Road Ensemble—the words enormously gifted and incredibly talented come up frequently—but he insists he always has time for the Stephen Harpers of the world. “I love it when people do something else as a profession, but they actually really enjoy music and do it on their own in their leisure time,” he says. “In some ways, a professional like me aspires toward the condition of the amateur, because the only reason an amateur plays is because they love it. We want to make sure that just because we’re professional and it’s something that we do for our living, we’re not doing it just for our living. We’re doing it because we love it.”

Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble play the Orpheum Theatre on Sunday (April 10).