Linda May Han Oh was born August 25, 1984, in Malaysia to a family of Chinese heritage and raised in Perth, Western Australia. She started classical piano at four, took up clarinet at eleven and bassoon at thirteen, and picked up electric bass at fifteen, playing in high school and community big bands. In 2002 she entered the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts to study upright bass, graduating with first-class honours; her thesis examined the influence of classical Indian rhythmic structure on bassist Dave Holland's improvised solos. She won the Bob Wyllie Scholarship for best graduating recitalist and a West Australian Youth Jazz Orchestra scholarship in 2005, then the ASCAP Young Jazz Composers Award in 2008, the same year she moved to New York and completed a master's degree at the Manhattan School of Music, studying with Jay Anderson, John Riley, Phil Markowitz, Dave Liebman and Rodney Jones.

Her working group, the Linda Oh Trio, self-released its debut, Entry, in 2008, with drummer Obed Calvaire and trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire. Trumpeter and Greenleaf Music founder Dave Douglas brought her into his orbit soon after: she appears on the label's various-artists sampler GPS Vol. 2: Orange Afternoons (2011) alongside Douglas, Ravi Coltrane, Vijay Iyer and Marcus Gilmore, and Greenleaf released her first quartet album as a leader, Initial Here (2012), with pianist Fabian Almazan, drummer Rudy Royston, saxophonist Dayna Stephens and violinist Christian Howes. That year she topped the Rising Star, Bass category of DownBeat's Critics Poll. She followed it with Sun Pictures (2013, Greenleaf), a trio-plus-horn date with saxophonist Ben Wendel, guitarist James Muller and drummer Ted Poor. Around the same period she joined saxophonist Joe Lovano and Dave Douglas's co-led quintet Sound Prints, formed in 2011 to write new music in the spirit of Wayne Shorter rather than simply cover him; with pianist Lawrence Fields and drummer Joey Baron, the group documented itself on Live at Monterey Jazz Festival (2013) and Scandal (2018), the latter also reworking two Shorter compositions, "JuJu" and "Fee Fi Fo Fum."

Oh moved her own leader dates to Biophilia Records, the label she runs with her husband, pianist Fabian Almazan (married 2018), starting with Walk Against Wind (2017), an electric-leaning record built around Almazan, guitarist Matthew Stevens, saxophonist Ben Wendel, drummer Justin Brown and Korean percussionist Minji Park. Aventurine (2019) followed, adding a cello (Jeremy Harman) and vibraphone (Ches Smith) to a band with saxophonist Greg Ward and pianist Matt Mitchell, and won the 2020 Art Music Award for Work of the Year: Jazz in her native Australia. In January 2018 she recorded Trion (Giant Step Arts) as an equal-billed trio with saxophonist Chris Potter and drummer Johnathan Blake, taped live over two nights at The Jazz Gallery.

In December 2019 she recorded Uneasy (ECM, released 2021) as an equal-billed trio with pianist Vijay Iyer and drummer Tyshawn Sorey, a record built around Iyer's own compositions plus readings of Cole Porter's "Night and Day" and Geri Allen's "Drummer Song"; the trio reconvened for Compassion (ECM, 2024). In 2022 she was one of five co-credited leaders, alongside drummer Terri Lyne Carrington, pianist Kris Davis, trumpeter Nicholas Payton and guitarist Matthew Stevens, on New Standards, Vol. 1 (Candid), a recording of pieces from Carrington's songbook New Standards: 101 Lead Sheets by Women Composers; it won the Grammy Award for Best Jazz Instrumental Album at the 65th Annual Grammy Awards in February 2023, Oh's first Grammy. Her next leader date, The Glass Hours (2023, Biophilia), paired originals with her own lyrics and voice against a quartet of Almazan, saxophonist Mark Turner, drummer Obed Calvaire and guest vocalist Sara Serpa. She became an Associate Professor in Berklee College of Music's Bass Department and its Institute for Jazz and Gender Justice, and in 2025 released Strange Heavens (Biophilia), a trio with trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire and Tyshawn Sorey.

In June 2026 the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation named Oh a Guggenheim Fellow in music composition for Dreams of Knowing, an interdisciplinary project converting neuroscience and climate-science data into sound, rhythm and harmony across recordings, multimedia performances and community engagement work with scientists and visual artists. The same year she released a duo album with saxophonist Melissa Aldana, Beneath Lifted Skies.

Oh's playing joins a large, centered acoustic tone to genuine fluency on electric bass, and she doubles on bassoon and voice on her own records rather than treating them as novelties. Her academic study of the rhythmic language in Dave Holland's solos shows up directly in the metric elasticity of her own writing, and she moves comfortably between repertoire-based postbop (Sound Prints' Wayne-Shorter-adjacent book, the Chris Potter/Johnathan Blake trio) and open-form, collectively improvised settings (the Vijay Iyer/Tyshawn Sorey trio, her own Aventurine). The Wall Street Journal has praised her "wide-ranging style and skilled improvisation," and her recent turn toward interdisciplinary composition, mapping scientific data onto sound for her Guggenheim-funded Dreams of Knowing, extends a compositional curiosity that has run through her leader catalog since Initial Here drew on her own multicultural upbringing.