If there's one song on Canadian jazz vocalist Holly Cole's new album Shade that speaks for the rest of the disc, it's the Beach Boys' song God Only Knows.

"The song is not about summer, and it's the only song (on the record) that isn't a jazz standard, but I thought it was the perfect context for it," Cole says from her Toronto home/studio where Shade was made.

That perfect context she speaks of is a summer album that seeks to capture the essence of the season as opposed to hitting more obvious themes.

"The idea of making a summer record, the only way that it was interesting to me was to not make it typical ... AM radio, real light, light stuff," says the artist, who plays tonight at the Jubilee. "A day at the beach is great ... but that's one thing that summer offers.

"I thought 'What about exploring some of the other aspects of summer?' "

Hence you have cool jazz treatments of tracks such as Cole Porter's Too Darn Hot and Johnny Mercer's The Midnight Sun.

For Cole, whose previous recorded output includes two Christmas albums, Shade was also an opportunity to celebrate and tap into her nationality, in an equally less obvious way.

"Summer is a very important event in this country because it's brief and it's intense and almost everyone looks forward to it," she says. "And I think everyone has a strong emotional connections with past summers."

It's also sort of in keeping with Canada's socialist slant -- summer, she argues is the one great equalizer.

"That's what I love about it," Cole says with a laugh.

"Societally we've set up all these prejudices or value judgements, like you're rich, I'm poor; you're a boy, I'm a girl ...

"But if we're all outside -- it's the equalizer. It's over. We're all really hot and it doesn't matter who you are or who I am ... We're just all really hot and there's nothing you can do about it.

"I love the power of that."

And what next for Cole?

Bebop autumn? Swing spring?

Well, don't be too surprised if she lingers in the Shade a little while longer.

"I just really never thought of myself as summer record material," says Cole, "but now I'm loving it."