Bassist and composer Linda May Han Oh is one of the defining instrumentalists of her generation. Born in Malaysia, raised in Perth, and long based in New York and now Boston, she won a GRAMMY for Terri Lyne Carrington’s New Standards Vol. 1, received the 2023 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts, and became the first woman to top DownBeat’s International Critics Poll for double bass, alongside multiple Jazz Journalists Association Bassist of the Year honors.

Her sideman résumé is its own argument: the Pat Metheny Quartet, Vijay Iyer’s ECM trio, and Sound Prints with Joe Lovano and Dave Douglas, among many others. As a leader she has released six acclaimed albums of increasingly ambitious original music, from Aventurine’s double quartet writing to “The Glass Hours,” which threaded meditations on time and mortality through some of the most agile small-group playing on record; her latest project, “Beneath Lifted Skies,” deepens a long partnership with saxophonist Melissa Aldana. Oh’s quartet music foregrounds what has always distinguished her: a huge, singing sound on both upright and electric bass, rhythmic architecture that feels inevitable, and compositions that give brilliant collaborators genuine stakes rather than solo space.