There’s a corner of Washington Square Park that I used to think was haunted by the ghosts of the great jazz musicians who had once lived nearby. If you walked directly across from where Eddie Condon’s old building sat (and where his daughter still resides), and not far from the apartment that housed, in succession, Pee Wee Russell and Kenny Davern, at almost any hour, you could hear a distant but distinct clarinet playing the blues, or Mozart, or perhaps a melody that sounded vaguely Brazilian.

I eventually learned that this wasn’t a ghost I was hearing, but a marvelous young multireed player named Anat Cohen, who is appearing tonight and tomorrow at Jazz Standard. I first heard Ms. Cohen about five years ago at the Arbors Records March of Jazz in Florida, where she was a member of the Diva Jazz Orchestra (which was managed by Stanley Kaye, a former drummer who played in Buddy Rich’s band, but that’s another story).

When Ms. Cohen took her first solo of the night, I knew immediately I hadn’t heard such a wailing, swing-style tenor saxophonist like that since Harry Allen (and before him, Scott Hamilton). After I picked my jaw up from the floor, I turned to look at Mr. Kaye, and he motioned for me to keep listening. When she next soloed, it was on clarinet, and I was a goner; hardly anyone plays with such a supple, lovely liquid sound like that anymore, making the clarinet cry with what is practically a human voice.

I soon found out that I was a latecomer to the Cohen party; veteran critics, like my own mentors Dan Morgenstern, Ira Gitler, and Nat Hentoff, who have followed the music since the 1940s and have literally heard everything (and are not easily impressed), had already given her a thumbs up.

Credit the increasing diversity and multiculturalism of jazz that the next major voice on the tenor saxophone and clarinet should be a young woman born in Tel Aviv who gained her first big band experience playing in the Israeli Air Force Band. Ms. Cohen moved to America in 1996 to study at the Berklee College of Music before joining Diva two years later. She has recorded prolifically as a featured player with Diva, the Three Cohens (which co-stars her brother Avishai on trumpet and her brother Yuval on soprano saxophone on an album called “One”), the Choro Ensemble (which explores a genre of Brazilian folk-pop music that predated the more sedate bossa nova), and the swing-styled Waverly 7. In 2005, she recorded her first album under her own name, “Place and Time.”

Now she stars in front of larger ensembles on two new releases: “Noir” and “Poetica” (both on the new Anzic Records label). “Noir” is more swing-driven than “Poetica,” but both come out of the more contemporary concept of orchestrations tailored to showcase a specific soloist (a la Gil Evans or Maria Schneider) rather than big-band dance music that incorporates hot solos. The two albums were arranged and co-produced by separate Israeli arrangers: “Noir,” which uses brass and strings and mixes Latin numbers with American standards, was produced by Oded Lev-Ari; “Poetica,” which blends tunes from all over the world, from France to Japan, by Omer Avital.

Appropriately, “Noir” opens with a number that belongs to both South America and the bigband era, Ernesto Lecuona’s “La Comparsa,” which was recorded by Harry James in 1941 as “For Want of a Star.” Ms. Cohen begins on clarinet, moaning low, as if off in the distance, a sound the residents of Waverly Place will recognize. The strings and then the rhythm and then the horns fill in behind her as she gradually gets louder and more agitated, accentuating the Cuban beat. Lecuona, who wrote both classical music and pop songs, predates the Cuban traditions of mambo and salsa; Accordingly, Ms. Cohen and Mr. Levi play “Comparsa” more like a bolero, a loose and swinging one, though not necessarily in a Harry James kind of way.

The first North American piece on “Noir” is “No Moon at All,” a moody but bouncing riff number originally introduced by Nat King Cole and picked up by Ella Fitzgerald and Anita O’Day, and thus largely more associated with singers than instrumentalists. Ms. Cohen also excels at two of the weepier hits of the 1950s: Johnnie Ray’s “Cry,” which she plays on clarinet with horns, and Julie London’s “Cry Me a River,” on which she plays alto sax with strings. “Cry” is a particularly intriguing arrangement; Ms. Cohen wails soulful alto in the foreground, while reeds and woodwinds form an intriguingly dissonant, pastelcolored background.

Ms. Cohen plays clarinet throughout “Poetica,” a welcome decision for the contemporary scene, where that long-neglected instrument is heard much less often, surprisingly, than the once-obscure bass clarinet. While much of “Noir” is Brazilian music, nearly all of “Poetica” is derived from the four corners of the globe — the Middle East, the Far East, and North and South America. At first glance, I would have thought it was a might too worldly for a bebop ‘n’ biscuits boy such as myself, but this is stunningly beautiful music, with Ms. Cohen’s lovely, liquid tone backed by a combination of a jazz rhythm section (including two prominent players who hail from the scene centering on the club Smalls in Sheridan Square, the pianist Jason Linder and Mr. Avital on bass) and classical string section. The lone jazz standard, John Coltrane’s “Lonnie’s Lament,” fits easily into this setting, though I must confess, I never thought I would hear it played with clarinet and strings. This is music that transcends all borders, whether of the generic or the geographical variety.

The most stunning of all the international pieces on either album is Luiz Bonfa’s “Samba de Orfeu” (better known in the states as “Sweet Happy Life”), which Ms. Cohen sweetly and happily pipes on soprano. The Brazilian tune climaxes in a joyous trade with the Anzic Orchestra’s all-star reed section (including Ted Nash, Billy Drews, and Scott Robinson, sax stars of the Jazz at Lincoln Center, Vanguard, and Maria Schneider Orchestras, respectively) and resolves itself in a big-band treatment of the Louis Armstrong classic “Struttin’ With Some Barbecue.” Barbecue indeed: The whole ensemble becomes a glorious parade, at once a Crescent City Second Line and a Pan-American conga line, marching from Rio to New Orleans and back, strutting not only with barbecue sauce but with salsa.

wfriedwald@nysun.com