Oh, the irony.

Though he's blowing through town on his Canadian Christmas tour tonight, jazz crooner Matt Dusk will be kind of hard-pressed to find any signs of the season once the big day rolls around.

"We went No. 1 in Japan, so I'll be playing there all through Christmas," says Dusk, the 29-year-old Toronto native who broke big with his 2004 debut Two Shots. "I've got an entourage of 20 with me, so it'll still be a big party. But unfortunately, we are going to be spending Christmas in a Buddhist country this year."

Still, don't count out a Christmas miracle just yet, as Dusk says he has every intention of staging a proper holiday party once he and his entourage are entrenched overseas.

And while the Japanese tour will prevent him from hanging out with his family this year, the Dusk clan's usual four-day-long party (which typically stretches from Christmas Eve to "Leftover Day" on Dec. 27) will instead be replaced by Chinese and Ukrainian New Year's celebrations, he says.

Before that, Dusk will be up to his armpits in Christmas -- a holiday he's well-versed in, having released the Noel-themed Peace on Earth disc back in 2005.

He agrees jazz singers (and country acts) have always been well-matched with Christmas tunes; a likely by-product of the season's links to performers from a bygone era.

"I think the crooning stuff really came up along with Holiday Inn and Bing Crosby and White Christmas," he says from Toronto, the morning after kicking off his tour with former Canadian Idol runnerup Theresa Sokyrka. "It kind of grew up around the American culture, and then spilled over to Canada. It's more of a sitting-by-the-fire, thing, which is what jazz is all about."

Don't expect tonight's show to be all carols and Christmas cheer, though -- "I would never put someone through that," he says with a laugh.

Instead, it'll be evenly divided between "obscure but fun" Christmas tracks (and a duet with Sokyrka on Baby It's Cold Outside), material from his big-band album Back in Town, and newer material that finds him test-driving a somewhat different sound.

Of Sokyrka, the 26-year-old singer he first met while guesting on Idol, Dusk has nothing but praise.

"She's a totally sweet girl, very nice, and I remember she had a big band tour of her own back in 2004," recalls Dusk, who was a regular fixture on Mark Burnett's reality show The Casino, and recorded Back in Town at the famed Capitol Studios in Los Angeles. "So I thought, 'Perfect -- here's an opportunity to tour Canada with another crooner.' Plus, she has a really male sense of humour, so she gets along great with everyone else."

And what about that new material we mentioned? Could another album be in the works?

"I am working on a new record, which will hopefully be out by next year," Dusk says, noting he hopes to do for swing music what Amy Winehouse has done for soul and R&B. "We're trying to take the genre in a bit of a new direction. As much as I love the crooning thing, I think I need to move on. I don't want to be singing As Time Goes By for the rest of my life, you know?"