If there was ever any doubt that Hiromi Uehara—who performs and records under her first name alone—is a fusion musician, that's surely been laid to rest by her most recent release, Beyond Standard. Backed by her accomplished Sonicbloom trio—guitarist David Fiuczynski, bassist Tony Grey, and drummer Martin Valihora—the Hamamatsu, Japan–born pianist delivers all the usual signifiers of the fusion genre: speedy tempos, muscular solos, rapid transitions in mood, and more than a little electrified aggression. But the new disc also serves notice that Hiromi's particular form of fusion is both accomplished and unusually accommodating: in addition to exuberant versions of Duke Ellington's swinging “Caravan” and Jeff Beck's jazz-rock masterpiece “Led Boots”, she also tackles impressionist composer Claude Debussy's “Clair de Lune” and a Japanese pop hit from 1961, “Ue Wo Muite Aruk?” (also known, in North America at least, as “Sukiyaki”).

Not many musicians could personalize such a diverse program so successfully, but eclecticism comes easily to this 30-year-old keyboardist.

“I love so many different kinds of music,” she says, reached at home in the modern-jazz mecca of Brooklyn, New York. “So I didn't really try to mix them up. It just happened that way very naturally.”

It helps, Hiromi adds, that she's been playing these pieces for a decade or more. But it's not just familiarity that lets her claim them for her own; she's also thought long and hard about how to give them a 21st-century makeover.

“I had a very clear image that I wanted to achieve with each piece,” she explains. “Like, when I did ”˜Clair de Lune', I just started to wonder what kind of landscape that Debussy was seeing when he was composing this song. He was watching the moonlight—and we still have moonlight. It's the only thing which is the same from when he was born and now. We have a completely different landscape apart from this one thing, the moonlight. So I just wanted to do my version of it, keeping the sense of the original.”

Hiromi's “Clair de Lune” is appropriately nocturnal, but it opens with a brief passage of clanging keyboards that nod to the inspiration Debussy found in the gamelan sounds of Java and Bali. And although her take on “Led Boots” is comparatively faithful to the original, at one point Hiromi's band tumbles into a strange, hiccupping motif—lifted, she says, from her scratched and skipping copy of Beck's Wired LP.

Inspiration is everywhere, she adds. On bassist Stanley Clarke's brand-new Jazz in the Garden, she contributes a gorgeous ballad, “Sicilian Blue”, which she penned while holidaying on the shores of the Mediterranean. On the other hand, her 2007 release, Time Control, was an artistic response to the jet-lagged and alienating world of the touring musician.

“The power of music lets all negative things become positive,” she explains. “Even sadness or anger—every emotion that people think is negative can become positive when it goes through the filter of music.”

Hiromi's Sonicbloom plays Performance Works on Saturday (June 27).