The meeting of great minds usually happens behind closed doors, but for two of the world's foremost bassists – Christian McBride and Edgar Meyer – the collaboration proved so fruitful that a duo album exploring their collective backgrounds in jazz, folk, classical, bluegrass and funk was born.

In 1995, Yo-Yo Ma, Edgar Meyer, and Mark O'Connor joined forces on Appalachia Waltz, the first of a series of Sony Classical albums celebrating the varied musical textures of Americana. Over the course of six years, several albums were cut, among them Short Trip Home, Liberty!, Uncommon Ritual, and Midnight on the Water, in addition to the Grammy-winning Appalachia Waltz. Each project may have had its own specific instrumental focus, although the shared theme was clearly to obfuscate the genre lines that separate classical and traditional American music on a 200-year journey from the concert halls of Britain to the Shenandoah Valley.

The follow-up album to the highly successful Appalachia Waltz collaboration, Appalachian Journey continues the combination of classical music with Appalachian, bluegrass, and American roots music in general. Yo-Yo Ma, alongside violinist Mark O'Connor and bass player Edgar Meyer, runs through a number of original compositions fusing the traditions, as well as a few old standards from the genre repertoire.

This collection features selections from eight of bass player Edgar Meyer's most popular albums made for Sony. It includes mostly Meyer's own compositions written for himself and friends, as well as his arrangements of folk pieces and transcriptions of classical works, and is an excellent introduction to the diversity of his interests and the range of his skills as a performer and composer.

APPALACHIA WALTZ brings together classical musicians and classic Americana with an enjoyable result: a discovery of the wealth and integrity of American folk music. Featuring classical virtuosi Edgar Meyer and Yo-Yo Ma with fiddler Mark O'Connor, a passionate advocate and composer of traditional Texas fiddle music, this Sony Classical release explores the vitality of American fiddle music in new compositions and arrangements, many by O'Connor himself.

Following the success of the Grammy award-winning album ‘The Goat Rodeo Sessions’, Yo-Yo Ma, Stuart Duncan, Edgar Meyer, and Chris Thile return with their sensational new album ‘Not Our First Goat Rodeo’. ‘Not Our First Goat Rodeo’ combines the talents of the four solo artists, each a Grammy Award- winning talent in his own right, to create a singular sound that’s part composed, part improvised, and uniquely American. The music featured in this stunning album is so complex to pull off that the group likens it to a goat rodeo — an aviation term for a situation in which 100 things need to go right to avoid disaster. Both the first album and the new recording also feature the voice and artistry of singer-songwriter and fellow Grammy Award-winner Aoife O’Donovan, who joins the group as a guest on ‘Not Our First Goat Rodeo’.