Moving to the United States from her native Japan at age 20 to study music was a bit frightening for jazz pianist Hiromi Uehara -- particularly as she didn't speak much in the way of English.

"I struggled a lot," said the 30-year-old musician, who performs under her first name alone (and who is appearing at Anthology in San Diego for two shows Saturday evening). "I only knew a few words. It was scary, but when I went to school the fear went away, because I could speak through music and it was so easy to make friends through music."

While her English has improved in the decade she's lived here (this interview was conducted in English by telephone from her New York City home), Hiromi said she still dreams in Japanese sometimes.

"It depends on who is starring in my dream. If it's an English-speaking person, the dream is in English."

The reputation of the famed Berklee College of Music in Boston drew her stateside, Hiromi said. Growing up in Japan, she was always intrigued by and drawn to music of many styles, and wanted to study composition and performance at a school that would encourage her boundary-breaking ways.

"I really wanted to study the arrangements and the orchestrations, and I was looking for a school where I could study that and didn't want a repertoire of classical only or jazz only. I felt Berklee was very open to that sort of thing."

Asked for some of her musical influences, Hiromi listed jazz pianist Erroll Garner (who died two years before she was born), rock guitarist Jeff Beck, jazz pianist Oscar Peterson, funk combo Sly & the Family Stone and the experimental band King Crimson.

Her first exposure to music came via her first piano teacher, she said.

"The first time I listened to jazz was when I was 8. She had me listen to 'Concert by the Sea' by Erroll Garner. … I showed so much interest in the music, and I was dancing to the music, she gave me the recording."

Excluding only the most recent of the five CDs she has recorded as leader, Hiromi has focused on her own compositions. ("Beyond Standard" was a collection of covers.) She said that while she sets aside regular time to work on songwriting, she also tries to stay open to inspiration whenever and wherever it may strike.

"I'm always interested in writing. I keep music in journals, on an everyday basis. I'm always looking for ideas that can be music."

As for those purists and others who claim jazz is a dead or dying art form, Hiromi will have none of it -- even though she pointedly refused to categorize her own heavily improvised music as jazz.

"I never thought it was dead. I think it's so alive. When you limit the word 'jazz' to one period of history, for the people who love that period, then maybe it can be dead because nobody plays like that anymore. But jazz is progressive music; it always has to progress and musicians always have to find new landscapes and new ways to speak out, so of course it's always changing.

"So maybe people who loved that one period, maybe that's why, but I think jazz is born every single day."

Hiromi

When: 7:30 and 9:30 p.m. Saturday

Where: Anthology, 1337 India St., San Diego

Tickets: $12-$38

Info: 619-595-0300 or anthologysd.com

Web: hiromimusic.com