SO MUCH waiting, so little music. Whitney Houston sang just three songs on this Sunday afternoon. Two of them — One of These Days and Telling Me No — were from her first studio album in four years, Just Whitney. The third was the old Bing Crosby Christmas chestnut Do You Hear What I Hear? Houston was on stage for exactly 24 minutes. For this, a large loving crowd of New Yorkers patiently waited for hours in near-freezing weather — all for the benefit of the producers of the breakfast TV show, Good Morning America.

But Houston’s appearance was riveting drama, if not in the way intended. To see Houston decked out in 1970s blaxploitation-queen chic (a Hendrix-like perm, embroidered bell bottoms, floor-length suede overcoat), babbling between tunes and bouncing across the stage with a nervous energy bordering on incoherence, was to see a once-immaculate pop-diva running amok like a super-caffeinated Macy Gray.

Like Michael Jackson, Houston now spends more time in gossip columns than in the charts. Her turbulent marriage to the fallen R&B star Bobby Brown, admissions of drug abuse and a reputation for prima donna behaviour have shattered Houston’s public image and undermined her commercial stature.

But musically, at least, Houston has been paying attention to the changes in R&B since her multiplatinum heyday a decade ago. One of These Days was heated rolling funk, right up Missy Elliott’s alley, and Houston sang it with a meaty mid-range purr, a switch from her often overwhelming aria acrobatics. And there was a confessional kick to the mid-tempo ballad Telling Me No: “You criticise my actions, but I don’t see you standing in my shoes.” If this had been a real concert, Houston might have been warming up for real fireworks. Instead, she wasted most of her brief stage time exhorting people to buy her album, then stumbled through the Christmas climax. She cut the music after one verse, then started over again, after the high-school choir accompanying her missed a cue. She also spent most of the song looking not at the audience but at sheets of paper taped to the stage; Houston was reading the lyrics as she sang.

There was one ray of light at the very end. When the Good Morning America host Diane Sawyer walked out for an on-camera chat and pointed to a sign held by a fan that read “Jesus Loves You, Whitney,” Houston veered into an impromptu blaze of gospel heroics, belting the children’s hymn Jesus Loves Me with the concentrated church-born firepower that first made her a star and had been missing all afternoon. For a few moments, you could hear the great singer still inside Houston, fighting to get out.