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So what in the world was wrong Sunday night, when Patti Austin and the Duke Ellington Orchestra performed in the last concert of the Phil's regular season?

These cats can play, there's no doubt about that. And the material — Ellington in the first half of the two-plus hour concert and Ella Fitzgerald's in the second — is the creme de la creme of jazz.

In the end, though, it was a collection of nice moments, musical comfort food and calculated choices that added up to just OK.

The Ellington Orchestra, led by Barrie Lee Hall Jr. on trumpet, opened the evening in a 45-minute set curiously all its own.

They hit most of the master's high points, kicking it off with Ellington and Billy Strayhorn's jaunty and knowing "Take the 'A' Train." Before they were done, they pulled out "Black and Tan Fantasy," "Cotton Club Stomp," "Jack the Bear" and the less familiar "Isafan," "Harlem Airshaft" and "Buddha."

Many were greeted by applause and a low hum of audience members singing along with the opening refrain.

Contributed photo

"We get to go down memory lane together tonight," Patti Austin told the Phil audience Sunday night.

It was a tight set with a big sound, which managed, for the most part, to balance a kind of oaky richness produced by most of the band with a trumpet line with XXL brass. The tunes were brief and in between, Hall, a sort of papa bear with a foot in a soft cast, jokes easily with his band, a kind intimacy and lack of pretense you'd expect in a tiny jazz club, not in a 1,425-seat hall.

Sometimes it seems like it's for the benefit of the audience ("Now I want my two bunnies," he says before two sax players hop to the microphone for dueling solos) and sometimes in celebration of their own private experience ("You know, when we got to the airport today," he says, trailing off as the orchestra laughs).

At mid-set, Hall even asks his musicians what they want to play next.

"It's certainly informal, isn't it?" a woman whispered to her partner as the band mugs.

He nodded. "It's good, though."

By 8:25 p.m., though, some in the audience were checking their watches. When is Patti Austin coming on?

That didn't happen until after the 20-minute intermission.

A little after 9, the Ellington Orchestra returned, minus Hall, and Austin strolled on stage, a sparkling vision in a long, wedding-dress-white wrap dress. She's older now — 55, she says several times during her hour-long set — but striking with ash and gray hair and a surprisingly svelte frame.

"I'm looking at an audience that knows this music," she said, shading her eyes from the spotlight to look into the packed house. They laugh. "We get to go down memory lane together tonight."

She continues with some patter about steering younger listeners to better music and that, for her, no one has held up better over the years than Ella Fitzgerald. Which makes sense when you consider that in 2002 she produced the Grammy-nominated album "For Ella"

"I didn't win and I harbor no bitterness for that witch Diana Krall," she says, only she doesn't say witch. The audience laughs.

The set that follows intersperses shtick — part Fitzgerald history, part personal revelation, part out-and-out vaudeville — with the nearly song-for-song route that her album cut, starting with the classic "Too Close for Comfort."

Before she starts, though, Austin — who is goddaughter of jazz legends Quincy Jones and Dinah Washington — reminds her audience that she's not here to "imitate but to pay tribute."

Which is perhaps part of the stickiness — and for me, the letdown — of this kind of concert. Pay tribute to Ellington, no problem. His compositions were emblematic of his vision, of his band and of his time. A talented artist can spin that anyway he or she wants, making it theirs in the spinning.

But Fitzgerald was no composer. She was an interpreter of the works by composers like Rodgers and Hart, Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, the Gershwins and many others.

Granted, she had an inimitable muscularity when it came to working a song. Her scatting, which was largely spontaneous, is legendary, and although she had a special skill for the delicate regret of a "But Not For Me" or a "Learnin' the Blues," Fitzgerald was first and foremost a breezy technician.

How do you actually pay tribute to that?

Austin tries with stories about Fitzgerald and with nuanced (sometimes, as in "Miss Otis Regrets," goosed with gospel) interpretations of tunes identified with the singer. During the course of the set, you ricochet from Austin, to Fitzgerald in narrative to Austin in song and then, inevitably, you grope for Fitzgerald in it all.

She gives us a playful "Honeysuckle Rose," an animated "You'll Have to Swing it (Mr. Paganini)", a pretty "Our Love is Here to Stay," a sassy "A Tisket A Tasket," which drew in a contribution from the band.

Perhaps, in the end, you have to return to Austin's voice, which is still lovely, even years after the albums that made her a name in some circles. She scats here and there throughout the evening, but admits before "How High the Moon," on which she was determined to replicate Fitzgerald's complicated trail of notes, that scatting isn't exactly her thing.

She's saucy and frank, which is refreshing. Often funny, too.

All of which elevates the evening well beyond the performances on the album, which was recorded live in Koln, Germany, with the WDR Big Band Orchestra.

And as I walked out, I thought: forgettable but, well, just fine.