She has worked for years with acclaimed cellist Yo Yo Ma

Wu Man can make the pipa, a musical instrument nearly 2000 years old, sound like Jimi Hendrix’s electric guitar, Ralph Stanley’s Appalachian banjo, Bach’s lyrical harp, or nature’s babbling brook.

No wonder the Chinese-born artist has earned the reputation as one of the world’s most influential musicians. Her eclectic interests lend themselves to collaborating with jazz combos, classical orchestras and international traditional ethnic artists.

With performances scheduled from southern California to Baltimore during these past two weeks, Wu Man will make a stop in Lewiston at the Olin Arts Center Wednesday, Feb. 28, as part of Bates College’s World Music Week. The concert begins at 8 p.m. and admission is free. From there, she is off to Australia, China, Korea, and back to the States in April.

Wu Man’s performance at Bates has been made possible by a gift from Frank Wendt of Connecticut and his wife, Barbara, an alumna of the college’s class of 1944, said Gina Fatone, assistant professor of music at Bates College.

“This year we are focusing on the music of East Asia,” said Fatone, who specializes in southeast Asian music. “We had a very generous sponsor who had approached us about the possibility of a performance at Bates by Wu Man, and this fit in very nicely with our Silk Route theme. Mr. Wendt found her artistry very compelling.”

The college’s World Music Week, organized by Fatone and titled “Echoes of the Silk Route,” coincidentally echoes years of Wu Man’s work with acclaimed cellist Yo Yo Ma, who recruited Wu Man for his nonprofit Silk Road Project, a series of ongoing tours that unite music from the Western and Eastern hemispheres. Ma started the project in 1998 with a core of about 60 international musicians.

Avant garde composers such as Terry Riley and Philip Glass have frequently written specifically for Wu Man and the Kronos Quartet, renown in its own right for broadening the world’s audience for string music over the past 30 years.

Pronounced pee-pa with the accent on the second syllable, the ancient stringed instrument traditionally emits the mournful minor timbres of Asian peasant life and the stylized dexterity of courtiers and intellectuals.

Wu Man has dutifully revived China’s musical tradition in nearly 20 years of recordings. In one of her most recent works, “Wu Man and Friends” (2205), she pays attentive homage to her homeland with bitter-sweet tremelos in “Waves Lapping at the Shore,” which she plans to play at the Bates concert.

The piece was composed by a blind street musician named A Bing, whose musical lore provided a bridge between ancient and modern life in China. Bing allowed for China’s tradition to be preserved and later annotated, like much of the musical research that took place in the U.S. Appalachian mountains with live recordings of mountain people who carried on an unwritten tradition and allowed themselves to be recorded by musicologists.

Wu Man’s performance Wednesday promises to enlighten audience members on the dual roles of a lyrical and martial instrument with a largely traditional program. “Dance of the Yi People” serves as a quintessential example of the two performance styles. Although composed by Wang Huiran in 1960, the lengthy piece is based on folk tunes of the Yi ethnic minority in southwest China.

Wu Man studied and trained at the Central Conservatory of Music In Beijing. She left China for the United States in 1990, at age 25, in search of adventure, challenges and opportunities. But she found very few outside the Chinese community who appreciated the pipa, or had even heard of it.

By her own recounts, Wu Man played for anyone and everyone who would listen. Today, she is in constant demand for concert performances, cultural festivals, composing collaborations, and even movie music scores.

The soundtrack from “The Wedding Banquet,” a 1993 movie about a gay Chinese immigrant in New York conflicted with his conservative parents, gives a glimpse into Wu Man’s unique talent for crossing cultural, geographic and generational chasms. Her music practically tells the story without the need for a script.

Wu’s versatility for different traditional genres again finds a showcase on “Wu Man and Friends.” She complements musicians of Uganda, the Ukraine and North Carolina. In “Hangzhou Blues,” from her 2003 “Wu Man Pipa – From A Distance,” Wu Man reveals that despite her Chinese upbringing, she is still a child of the ’60s and wails on the pipa in Hendrix fashion.

Yet equally impressive is the alternately serene and strident qualities often associated with China as heard in the Oscar-winning score for the “The Last Emperor.”

The lyrical sounds of “Love Song,” based on a folk tune of southwest China, blurs East and West with the accompaniment of a sopilka, a Ukrainian shepherd’s flute. In this piece, Wu Man’s gentle plucking and mesmerizing vibratos could easily be mistaken for Eastern Europe’s balalaika or the Mediterranean’s mandolin.

Whatever musical taste an audience may have, Wu Man can deliver. From Bollywood in India to Dollyworld in Tennessee to Carnegie Hall, Wu Man brings incredible range and relevance to an ancient and deceivingly simple instrument like the pipa.