A year before her proper debut was released in 1990, jazz vocalist Holly Cole put out a holiday disc titled "Christmas Blues." Since then, she has issued two other seasonal albums, "Santa Baby: Live in Toronto" (quixotically released in January of 2000) and "Baby, It's Cold Outside" in 2001.

You might expect, then, that Cole's engagement at the Dakota this week, billed as "Holly Cole -- A Night Before Christmas," would be wall-to-wall holiday fare. But you'd be wrong. As much as the Canadian-born singer loves this time of year, she also enjoys subverting expectations and refreshening traditions.

Q How much Christmas will be in your show?

A I'd say it is about 60-40 between Christmas and songs from the new record ["This House Is Haunted"] and other non-Christmas material. It is not a religious show but more like a holiday show, a seasonal show, and I think it is a pretty fun show. Christmas is a wonderful time, but there is also a lot to deal with that can cause a lot of stress, so I want this to be a show to relax you. I like to inject a bit of humor and poke a stick at Christmas, which can be so commercial, with a million agendas flying everywhere. I'll tell you this much: Santa Claus is not exactly the sexiest icon; it is a challenge to make him sexy, but I am up to the task.

Q You love to rearrange music and also to improvise on the fly. Is that how you got into jazz?

A It is what attracted me. My parents are both classical piano players. Everyone in my family plays piano; we learned it as children. But as with many children, I wasn't interested in classical music and I was also rebellious. So when my older brother started studying jazz at the Berklee College of Music, I hitched down from New Brunswick and showed up on his doorstep in Boston when I was 15. I just stayed in the dorm with him. We both had long hair and he looks like me so he'd show his picture ID and go in and then his roommate would come out and give it to me and then I'd go in with the ID, too, and it worked every time. The first time I stayed about three weeks, sleeping on his floor.

At that time I wasn't into jazz so much as going to Boston to see my brother, but suddenly I was surrounded by these young people utterly committed to this music. At that point, the jazz I'd heard was mostly "Charlie Brown's Christmas," but here I was immersed in it with all these passionate people and my jaw just dropped. I had been interested in the pop music of the '60s, and the country music from where I'm from, and Celtic music; not so much classical music. But my parents had been ear-training me with the classical music they played, and when I heard jazz, it contained all the sophistication and complexity of classical music, but not this regal aspect that I perceived at the time. So to me, jazz was like classical music for people who were kind of bad and subversive, which, of course, was attractive to me.

And one of the huge elements was the spirit of improvisation. It was not only that you could make a very personal statement, but you could do something that you really cared about. Every once in a while I get a wave of gratitude because I see people all the time who maybe wanted to do something that they didn't end up getting to do, or people who never figured out what they wanted to do. I was so lucky because I figured it out young. It was like an ephiphany for me, going down there as a 15-year-old. I just thought it would be fun, and instead it was a life-changing event that changed me forever.