Seeing Holly Cole when the days are hot is like sighting Santa Claus in a thong at the beach - it just doesn't fit. In more ways than one.

Through no real fault of her own, this sultry Toronto jazz singer has become synonymous with winter - typecast as the black snow queen. She is rather good in the role. Aside from the Christmassy coincidence of her name, Cole's dark treatment of Christmas music deviates wonderfully from the usual happy, sappy shopping music it usually ends up being. There are a surprising number of fans who share this ambivalent attitude. Cole's Christmas gigs are some of the most popular tickets in town.

So what's she doing here at this time of year, you ask?

Once you get over the fact that Holly Cole doesn't spend her summers in Antarctica, it should come as no surprise that she brings the same sense of bittersweet ennui to summer music as she does to yuletide fare on her new album Shade. Yes, she's branching out. It's a summer album backed up by a summer tour. Cole performs tomorrow night at the Winspear Centre as part of the Jazz City festival.

Shade is not a typical summer album. There are lots of nuances and hidden meanings.

"Shade represents relief for me," Cole says in a phone interview. "The ironic thing is that the very thing you desire is the very thing you're looking for relief from - the sun. I'm also looking for relief from some of the summer records. Summer records aren't usually my favourites. Hopefully this record provides some relief."

It turns out that summer is as emotionally complicated as Christmas - for this artist, at any rate - something the album does a fine job of capturing. In a warm, immaculate jazz setting, Cole even manages to make standards like Lazy Afternoon and Moonglow sound spooky.

"Things are not as simple as they seem - ever," she says. "It would be nice if they were. When I was 16 they were. When I was 16 everyone who got married was a total sellout jerk. Things were so black and white it was great.

"It'd be great if Christmas was all great. Wouldn't life be great? It'd be great if summer was all sunny days at the beach. That would be wonderful. It wouldn't be wonderful! I don't want summer to be all sunny days at the beach. I love cloudbursts. I love those afternoons that are so oppressively hot and still that it's confrontational, almost. I find it oddly a time that I get reflective - maybe because you can't do anything else."

Hearing Cole talk of the thought and artistry behind her songs with such passion might make you forget that she didn't actually write any of them. This singer is a reminder that an "interpreter" of songs can be just as creative as the songwriter. It wouldn't even be an issue in the old days.

"People never asked Ella Fitzgerald about her own writing, because it didn't matter," Cole says. "Some people don't understand. I have opinions about that. In the '60s, the era of singer-songwriter came about, and it stuck around, for good and bad. Monetary reasons had a lot to do with it, the record companies wanting a piece of publishing, so there's lots of incentive for people to write their own songs, even if they don't want to or aren't very good at it.

"One of the reasons I do a lot of the material from a time period from well before I was born is the craft of songwriting was not only generally higher, but it was also different. People didn't write for themselves. They wrote for others. It changes the way you write, I think. George and Ira Gershwin never thought they were going to make an album of their tunes. They knew that someone else was going to sing them; they didn't even necessarily know who. They wrote in a way that linked them to interpreters."

There are very few artists, she adds, who are a triple threat - great songwriter, great lyricist and great interpreter.

Cole is content with one out of three.