AGA Derlak does not usually play any David Bowie songs with her trio but a tribute to the late creator of Warszawa, Ashes to Ashes and Lazarus might yet feature in her concerts.

The Polish pianist, who makes her Scottish debut at Edinburgh Jazz Festival this weekend, was invited to take part in a special arrangement of these Bowie songs as the winner of Fryderyk 2016, Poland’s most important musical award, and is seriously reconsidering her trio’s "no covers" policy as a result.

The Bowie sequence was put together by Derlak’s fellow pianist Nikola Kolodziejczyk for an ensemble including trumpet, bass clarinet, string quartet and Derlak’s trio. It was a once-only performance and “wonderful,” says Derlak, who is becoming used to winning awards, having racked up a handful of others before Fryderyk since emerging on the Polish scene with her trio in 2012. “Maybe we should play some Bowie with the trio to honour him.”

Playing jazz piano has been Derlak’s dream since she attended her first jazz concert with her parents at the age of ten. She’d been listening subconsciously to jazz through her father’s record collection before this epiphany but this didn’t prepare her for the thrill she felt on hearing the harmonies, melodies and improvisations of the band in question, a group of Polish musicians who were making a rare visit to her home town, Chelm, in Eastern Poland.

“I remember thinking, I really, really, really want to be a jazz pianist,” she says via Skype from her base in Katowice. “But back then that would have been impossible. There were no women musicians in jazz that I knew about. I didn’t know about Carla Bley or JoAnne Brackeen or any of the other great women musicians at the time. There were women singers – but a pianist? No. So I gave up my dream and studied classical music for six years, and after that I switched from piano to flute.”

She might have made it as a flautist, too. The great Polish saxophonist Zbigniew Namys?owski visited the Fryderyka Chopina music school in Warsaw, where Derlak was studying flute in the jazz department by this time, and chose her to play in a student ensemble to perform his music.

“It was a ten-piece group and the music was really complicated and challenging but actually beautiful,” she says. “This was the beginning of my jazz adventure and it was great training. It was a really important opportunity, meeting Zbigniew Namyslowski. It gave me the confidence to return to my dream of playing jazz piano.”

Moving to Katowice’s music academy, she met double bassist Tymon Trabczynski and drummer Bartosz Szablowski and the three students bonded due to their similar musical tastes and inspirations. They practised together at every opportunity, quickly forging a group identity.

“We were free to play whatever we wanted and we would get very excited by the ideas we came up with as a group,” she says. “Maybe that’s why we’re still together, because right from the start we felt the same way about how we were going to play, how we wanted to sound.”

Derlak’s trio is part of a generation that has created a very strong jazz scene in Poland. She puts the health of the scene down to the camaraderie that has built up through students supporting each other in the academies and continuing to support one another as they move on into careers as professional jazz musicians.

“There’s a great variety of jazz musicians in Poland now,” she says. “And it’s inspiring to be part of a movement where everyone has their own approach. It’s a really friendly scene. We all go out and listen to each other when we can, and we hang out together and talk about what we’re working on and what we’ve been listening to.”

Among Derlak’s current enthusiasms is the Dutch-born, Los Angeles-raised pianist Gerald Clayton, whose music she describes as the sort of music she wants create herself.

“I listen to other pianists – Brad Mehldau, Keith Jarrett, of course, Craig Taborn, Aaron Parks – and they all have great sounds but Gerald Clayton, I’d say, is my main inspiration. I’ve transcribed his music to find out how he composes and what makes it special is that it’s complicated but at the same time very attractive to listen to. It’s full of ambition, joy, freedom, energy, emotion, all the things I want to convey in my own music.”

For Derlak and her trio, music is not about playing as many notes as possible at the fastest tempo possible.

“You can often say more in one note than you can in twenty notes,” she says. “I might not always have followed that idea but I think now I put more emphasis on emotion and making music with a message.”

Aga Derlak Trio appears at Rose Theatre, Edinburgh on Sunday.