Doing the research isn’t necessarily the best way to find out what Julia Hülsmann will be up to at the TD Vancouver International Jazz Festival this weekend.

Checking out her latest CD, A Clear Midnight: Kurt Weill and America, is a wonderful way to spend an hour, but it’s an album of songs and features the inimitable vocalist Theo Bleckmann. He’s not on the road with his fellow German, and the pianist says she’s not likely to step into his shoes.

“I would love to be able to sing, myself,” she says, reached at home in Berlin. “But nobody would like to listen to that!”

Digging deeper into Hülsmann’s back catalogue is instructive, but only to a point. One of the most notable aspects of her music is her profound rapport with her long-time trio, which includes bassist Marc Muellbauer and drummer Heinrich Köbberling.

However, Muellbauer won’t be on Hülsmann’s current tour either: he’s the pianist’s husband, and is staying home to take care of their 11-year-old son. Robert Landfermann will fill in: Hülsmann describes him as one of Germany’s top bassists, but notes that he’s a lot younger than she is, and claims that she doesn’t quite know how his occasionally extroverted tendencies will fit in with her more careful approach.

“We’ll see!” she says. “I’ve been playing with Marc for such a long time now that it’s really difficult for me to play with another bass player—but with Robert, it’s like he knows exactly what I want to do. He’s so quick at thinking and listening—his ears are so big. Of course, he has a lot of energy, too, and it’s always nice to have a new personality in the band who plays things a little different. Suddenly, the music goes into another direction—and, yeah, that’s good!”

Hülsmann’s own musical life took a marked change of course when she was in her teens, she lets on. Like most European jazz pianists, she’s classically trained—although she notes that she started late, when she was 11, and that, initially, she wasn’t all that into it.

“I had a very nice piano teacher,” she explains. “I liked her a lot, so I had lessons for five years, I think, and then I stopped. But when I stopped having these lessons I started to be more interested in pop music and asked my mother to find a pop piano teacher. She couldn’t find one, but she found a jazz piano teacher and I said, ‘Okay, I’ll go there.’

“In the end,” she continues, “this teacher was really important, and really good. So I gradually got into this jazz world, and then one day—it was the time of mix tapes, you know—he handed me a tape with all kinds of jazz on it, and there was some Bill Evans. Bill Evans with Jim Hall. I thought, ‘Wow, what’s that?’ And from then on I was hooked.”

Evans remains Hülsmann’s most important pianistic influence, and this, along with her fondness for song, helps make her music both harmonically sophisticated and approachably elegant—which is not a bad combination at all.

The Julia Hülsmann Trio plays the Ironworks on Saturday (June 27).