There will be many (especially in the UK where she hasn’t put in an appearance for years) who will have assumed that Jessye Norman had slipped gracefully into early retirement. So the spectacle of her, microphone in hand, jazzing it up at Berlin’s Philharmonie might come as something of a surprise. Or not. For a diva born and bred on Spirituals and raised in the ways of A-list performers like Ella Fitzgerald, Nina Simone, and Lena Horne it makes perfect sense to take what’s left of a once great instrument and hang loose with her very own (and very hot) jazz quintet and some of the songs that got away in a life full of Strauss, Schubert, Wagner and Berlioz. At least that’s the theory.

The reality is rather different and makes this a very difficult album to review. The opening group of Spirituals – a cappella or shared with solo instruments – starts well enough: the old ache and longing comes from the heart for sure and even though the legendary control is now compromised, the tone uneven and the vibrato wider, there is an honesty and new-found earthiness to the delivery which transcends the unsettling awareness of what once was and is no more. The good notes kind of come and go – you can’t be sure of them any more.

But then we slip deeper into the realms of jazz and while vocal finesse is by no means a prerequisite to mastery of the genre, deep-rooted instincts are. Norman may feel like she’s in her element but to those of us out there in the dark who’ve thrilled to Ella’s scat and Lena’s smokiness she sounds oddly counterfeit. The scat on “Heaven” borders on the embarrassing, “Somewhere” is brutally heavy on the mike, ugly and ill-tuned, and speaking of intonation – notwithstanding, of course, the appropriate note-bending – “April in Paris” is eye-wateringly awful. “Habanera” from Bizet’s Carmen was always decidedly “arch”, even in Norman’s prime; now it’s a parody of what it was. She swoops and swoons and in the case of “Stormy Weather” hangs on to just about every phrase without saying anything pertinent about the song itself. It doesn’t sound like a great song anymore, and we know it is.

Ellington’s “Solitude” is one of the better tracks – the longing of it harkens back to the Spirituals and it resides in a part of her voice where you feel she can nurture its age-old sentiment. But I have to say I found the whole experience of this double album really heavy going and sometimes quite distressing. Maybe if you’d been there…The Berliners, still clearly worshipping at the shrine of La Norman, are delirious by the time “the Saints go marching in”. Me, I’d started reaching for Ella with renewed urgency.