Maria Schneider writes such marvelously descriptive music that it’s a wonder film producers haven’t tapped her to compose scores for them. Perhaps the reason is because her compositions are so overwhelmingly vivid in the way they paint a picture and tell a story as to become completely selfcontained — there would be nothing for the director, the cinematographer, or the actors to add.

Take “Concert in the Garden,” the centerpiece of her opening show on Tuesday night at Jazz Standard — a rare weeklong gig for the composerarranger-bandleader, who turns 46 in a few days. It’s also the title work of her most recent album, but playing the CD at home after the show, beautiful as it is, doesn’t have quite the impact of experiencing the work live.

Ms. Schneider is a student, both literally and figuratively, of the great Gil Evans, and “Concert in the Garden” reminds me of a concept the late Evans employed in his masterpiece setting for Miles Davis on “Sketches of Spain” (a score that Ms. Schneider conducted a few years ago at Carnegie Hall). At one famous point in the work, Evans and Davis aurally depict a contingent of musicians and soldiers marching from one end of the horizon to the other by means of adjusting the volume: As they get closer to us, meaning the audio “camera,” the ensemble gets louder; as they get farther away, the music gets softer.

In her notes to the “Concert in the Garden,” Ms. Schneider relates how she wrote the piece to describe what it was like for her as a child to sit in a tree house in her home in Minnesota and listen to the birds; she could identify all of them both by sight (peering out with a pair of binoculars) and by sound. In the same way that Evans and Davis used recording volume to trick the mind, in a sense, into a certain visual perception, Ms. Schneider uses the aural characteristics of various instruments in concert — many not found in the standard jazz band — to suggest the sounds of the denizens of the “garden,” with the principal soloists being Gary Versace on accordion, Frank Kimbrough on piano, John Hart on guitar, and Sofia Koutsovitis singing wordlessly.

Where most orchestrators, jazz or otherwise, think in terms of ensemble sections (like brass versus reeds versus strings),Ms. Schneider has set this piece up in terms of two different ensembles — the four principals in the role of various “swallows, blackbirds, great-billed herons, soras,”and the rest of the orchestra in the role of, well, the orchestra. Thus you have instruments pretending to be voices, voices imitating instruments, and instruments and voices making like animals and birds.

Mr. Kimbrough’s piano continually interacts with the others, supported by the urgent drumming of Greg Hutchinson. It’s effective on the CD, but at Jazz Standard, wrapped in Ms. Schneider’s exquisitely beautiful harmonies and tone colors, the effect is overwhelming: The voices and instruments, birds and animals seem to come at you from all angles; Ms. Koutsovitis harmonizes with the reed section to mimic an effect that resembles hearing an entire choir of mezzo-sopranos, not to mention birds crooning hymns back at St. Francis.

Ms. Schneider’s early show on Tuesday included five of these pieces, three of which we know from her previous albums: In addition to “Concert in the Garden” there was “Journey Home” and “Allegresse,” both from 2000’s “Allegresse.” Two others, “Iris de Lando” and “Sky Blue,” on which the soprano saxist Steve Wilson soloed in carefully tempered discord (i.e. playing deliberately out of tune) to express the anguish Ms. Schneider felt in losing a friend to cancer, will be recorded in several months for a new album to be released next year.

“Iris de Lando” provided the opening set with a worthy climax: Ms. Schneider began by explaining how it was inspired by music she heard while on a trip to Peru that contained a rhythm that sounded to her North American ears like 6/4, but which musicians and dancers treated as if there were four beats to a measure. This inspired a typically evocative piece built on polyrhythms and multiple meters, but what matters most in the final piece is the soloing of the versatile multireed player Scott Robinson, here playing clarinet. Staying mostly in the lower chalumeaux, he too tempered his intonation toward a specific purpose for capturing the pentatonic tones of clarinets employed in Spanish, Middle Eastern, and klezmer — and soloed incredibly expressively despite remaining within a carefully prescribed sonic range.

My old reservations about Ms. Schneider’s compositions — that they are breathtaking in terms of harmonies and orchestral colors, structure and even rhythm, but short on hummable, memorable melody — seem increasingly irrelevant as she continues to develop. Right now my major gripe about her music is that, since “Sky Blue” is only her sixth album in 15 years, there isn’t nearly enough of it.

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Thanksgiving Week may mark the first time in 60 years that both of the major jazz soloists in New York are clarinet players. In addition to Scott Robinson with Maria Schneider at Jazz Standard, the other essential musician to catch this weekend is Ken Peplowski, honoring Benny Goodman at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola. For the late show on Tuesday night, the band was mostly Benny’s, namely guitarist Bucky Pizzarelli and pianist Derek Smith, not to mention the leader, as well as the drummer and vibraphonist Chuck Redd and the bassist Alex Dankworth, and all the tunes were strictly BG. Yet Mr. Peplowski beautifully evoked the sound and style of the greatest of all jazz clarinetists without imitating his timbre, his licks, or his mannerisms — for instance, on “Memories of You,” he nailed down the feeling of Goodman without playing the famous introduction.

The quintet generated considerable heat on “Air Mail Special” and “I Found a New Baby” (which the leader dedicated to Madonna) and romance on Mr. Redd’s vibes feature, “The Shadow of Your Smile.” Just about the only emotion they didn’t inspire was simple nostalgia or sentiment.

wfriedwald@nysun.com