It's a brave artist who follows the likes of Ian Shaw and, most serenely, Luciana Souza and Norah Jones on Herbie's The Joni Letters into the world of Mitchell's masterworks. One immediate challenge is that despite their universal and lasting appeal, Mitchell's songs are deeply personal, entwined in Mitchell's own emotional world: a new interpreter has to re calibrate them to their own experiences, their own personality.

But Colman doesn’t back down. She's helped herself by recruiting close allies notably pianist Rebecca Nash, with whom Colman has a long association. Here they perform one song as a duo, an affectionate take, as befits the song, on ‘My Old Man’. More duos, with their implicit intimacy, may have enhanced the release. What we do have plenty of is Pursglove's golden-toned flugelhorn, notably on the title track from Court and Spark, one of the first Mitchell albums to reveal Joni's growing jazz sensibility. Colman herself doesn’t push the more exploratory ‘jazz’ side of Mitchell, with the tonalities falling more on the singer-songwriter side, but that's fair enough: Colman's band is solid, with Pursglove outstanding, but there's no Metheny, Brecker or most notably Pastorious to call upon.

But then, heh, who other than Mitchell could have employed such sidemen! Colman does however have a sound sense of rhythm and space and a clear articulation which brings out the lyrics, and thus Mitchell's poetry. This is particularly powerful on the complexities of ‘Down to You’. The re-framing of ‘Woodstock’ as a song of paradise lost rather than of youthful hope is also poignant. We may not feel we are stardust or golden right now, but Colman does her darndest to take us back to the garden.