CD Choice:Jazz

Concert in the Garden, Maria Schneider's 2004 Grammy Award winner, showed how authoritatively she dealt with the difficulty of unifying a written score and the unpredictability of an improvising soloist. Sky Blue, her latest, is an even more ambitious and successful example of that. Like Ellington, Schneider writes for the personalities of her soloists. The canvases remain hers, but they are essential colours on them.

On The Pretty Road, an ineffably American, richly suggestive recollection of a childhood drive home in rural Minnesota, Ingrid Jensen's lovely flugelhorn and trumpet solo is as integral to the piece and just as revealingly evocative as the orchestration. Tenor saxophonist Rich Perry is the focus of Rich's Piece, a beautiful, mysterious, slightly ominous tone poem whose constantly shifting colours dialogue with and support his dark-toned tenor.

They also show how far Schneider has evolved from any early Gil Evans influence. Her South American interests remain: amid the complex rhythms of Aires de Lando, derived from the Peruvian lando dance form, she gives Scott Robinson two superb clarinet solos, a lovely rubato duet with Gary Versace's accordion, and some of the most graceful, naturally flowing orchestral settings she's ever written.

The title piece, a moving, lyrical celebration of the spirit of a close friend who had died, features a Steve Wilson soprano solo that must be one of the loveliest he's ever recorded. But the pièce de résistance - and the longest track - of a memorable album is Cerulean Skies, an evocation of bird migration inspired by the swarms of colour and life they bring each spring to New York's Central Park. Much of it is based on a thematic fragment, beautifully developed orchestrally, over which Donny McCaslin's brilliant tenor solo evolves in the first section. But there is also a lovely rubato passage for Gary Versace's accordion solo, supported by bass and drums, with inspirational guitar from Ben Monder, which yields to an orchestral chorale as a prelude to Charles Pillow's climactic alto solo.

Closing, as it opened, with bird sounds from the orchestra members (and, at the close, the actual call of the Cerulean Warbler), Cerulean Skies is a stunning piece; as the best music always seems to do, it manages to reconcile surprise with inevitability.

Maria Schneider is now unequivocably up there with Bob Brookmeyer as the finest living composer and orchestrator in jazz. www.mariaschneider.com