For a musician used to playing indoors on a stage, the 2020 pandemic hit really hard. All the performances stopped (except for the online/Zoom events that were, quite frankly, awkward). So that got cellist Yo-Yo Ma thinking about how to connect with people through the great outdoors, and created Our Common Nature: a multi-faceted initiative to take his cello across the country to play music with folk musicians in Appalachia, to a dying birch forest in Alaska (video below), with Nipmuck musicians in Maine, and into Mammoth Cave with the Louisville Orchestra.
Podcast producer Ana González was with him through many of these adventures, recording along the way for the Our Common Nature podcast, a seven-part series telling the stories of the people in these communities where Ma stopped to play his cello.
In this conversation, González talks about how the podcast got started, what surprised her when visiting Mammoth Cave, and how a degree in jazz performance can come in handy when making a podcast.
