In today’s column in The Globe & Mail, I examine the fresh energy of the 22-year-old behind the Toronto Progressive Jazz series - who forces me to take one, teensy-weensy step away from my absolutist, preemptive-strike position against jam bands.

Obviously, I am not the kind of commander in chief we need in these troubled times.

(Further Evidence I Am a Flipflopper: Column also includes conciliatory gesture toward young Toronto improvisers. But I claim this is consistent with my position all along! Does anyone believe me? Stay tuned…)

Along with an along-the-way consideration of the ever-popular “is jazz dead or does it just smell funny” issue, the column also includes a nod to great Ornette sideman and harmolodic guitar wizard James Blood Ulmer, although, as I’ve already noted, the piece sadly misstates the date of his Lula Lounge show. (It was tonight, Thurs., not tomorrow.)

In other not-so-good news: I’ll probably report back from tomorrow night’s Progressive Jazz series event by the Dave Holland Quintet, but my fervor is dimmed by the fact that the pianist who would probably be my biggest new-generation American jazz man-crush, Jason Moran, says on his website that he’s had to cancel in Toronto due to a family emergency. Dammit!

(Nevertheless, nice interview with Moran by my colleague Mark Miller, also in today’s Globe.)

And the press release goes, doot-doo-doot-doo-doot… :

“Billy Corganís collection of poetry, Blinking With Fists, lands at bookstores this Friday. Billy to support poetry release with extensive tour featuring book signings and poetry evenings. … Billy is quoted as saying, ‘I think the poems have their own personality and are a lot closer in spirit to me as a person, as opposed to my song lyrics, which I believe deal more in pieces of me.’

“Billy supports the book with a 14-city tour commencing October 12, consisting of signings at major book stores and intimate ‘evenings of poetry’ [ed. note - quotation marks theirs, but heartily endorsed by Zoilus.com] with special guest Yungchen Lhamo. Details of the schedule are listed below.

October 19
Toronto, ON
Book Signing: Chapters - Festival Hall
142 John St 7:00 PM

Poetry Reading: The Church of the Redeemer
10:00 PM
Purchase Tickets - Password: blinkingwithfists

Want to imagine you are one of the world’s leading music obscurantists, renowned among an audience of dozens? Now you can! In the privacy of your own cubicle! Listen to what the staff of The Wire is listening to. The “office ambience” of the UK new-music bible. Not sure how often the playlist shuffles. Today: Albert Ayler, Can, Le Tigre, Subtle, Wasteland, Wolf Eyes, DJ/rupture, Masaki Batoh, 267 Purkkia Liimaa and Cul De Sac/Damo Suzuki.

Hey hey, look who’s posting again. I hope he’ll stick around long enough at least to let us know his thoughts on Costello’s The Delivery Man, which is rawking through my earphones for the first time as I type. (Great sound, though I’m beginning to sense what about Oughties production style is gonna sound dated in a decade - this too-much-in-the-round ambient style, in which all the instruments are kind of part of a cyclorama and never thurst forward at you. A case of Too Much Progress, or are my ears stuck in the nineties, or what?)

Nice Elvisania in der Globe today by my senior colleague Robert Everett-Green. Personally I will likely let Il Sogno slide - I’m willing to accept that it’s a much-above-average exemplar of pop-star orchestral writing (ie. wiping the floor with Macca and Joe Jackson) but not my cuppa & inessential to my mental map of Costelloland for any but scholarly purposes.

Oh and: Lucinda Williams sounds totally drunk.

Tom Waits announces a U.S. show to warm up for his Euro tour, and appears tonight on David Letterman, all to hail new disc Real Gone. (It’s his first album of new songs since ’99’s Mule Variations, since 2002’s Alice and Blood Money were both collected from stage projects.) A Real Gone preview MP3 is here. It drops a week from today.

(Anybody go to the Waits tribute at the ElMo last night?)

Frog Eyes, makers of last year’s No. 1 Zoilus album (with the above-pic’d force of nature, Canada’s greatest new songwriter Carey Mercer) at the Horseshoe last night: Discouragingly low-attended, maybe 30-40 people there at the peak, but a fanatic cluster up front dancing and cheering to Carey’s Beefheart-sings-the-Weavers wonderment. The mix sucked so his virtuoso swoops were sapped of all punch and you couldn’t make out the ecological pirate epics in the lyrics. As well I think this show set the record for the number of people who attended alone that I’ve seen at any rock show this year. People get the way the music’s hermetic, it seems, but not how hypercommunal it is?

This year we’ve been graced with three Frog Eyes-related discs - the ‘proper’ third album The Folded Palm, Carey’s solo project Blackout Beach, and perhaps my favourite, the stripped-down ‘acoustic’ disc, Ego Scriptor. The highlight of last night’s show was probably the rendition of that disc’s opening track A Latex Ice Age, which began almost a capella then built into a cracking-glacier-noise cascade. All three albums will furnish you with an entirely new reality in which to live.

Post-show highlight was a story told by bassist Michael Rak about a club they played in Winnipeg where a soundman cranked up on crystal crawled under the stage and somehow managed to suffocate himself down there and die. Nobody knew where he had gone - they assumed he’d gone missing in the streets, and the club actually staged a benefit show to aid in the search. So the performers got up and sang tributes to the local legend-to-be and pled for info as to the poor bastard’s whereabouts, “come home stan, come home” (if his name was stan), from the very stage his body was decomposing under. The story goes that it was such a beer and tobacco-smoked dive bar so nobody smelled anything rotten - and he wasn’t discovered till the Manitoba smoking ban kicked in.

Rak added that last night was the best show of the tour so far. My sympathies, noble Frog Eyes.

While that NY Times piece on Nancy Sinatra’s new joint got me buzzing just like it was meant to - Nancy hearts Thurston! Nancy sings Morrissey and J. Cocker! - it made the mistake of messing with Loretta Lynn. This, my friends, ain’t no mistake to make. Jody Rosen wrote:

Trend-watchers may be tempted to compare “Nancy Sinatra” to another meeting between an older star and young rock turks: “Van Lear Rose,” the Loretta Lynn album produced by Jack White of the White Stripes, which appeared earlier this year. But while “Van Lear Rose” gave Ms. Lynn’s music a makeover, adding an unmistakably White Stripes-like garage rock snarl, “Nancy Sinatra” is a different case. Rather than overhaul Ms. Sinatra’s classic sound ó a mix of go-go rhythms, country twang and orchestral pop ó her collaborators have paid it homage. It’s a tribute that invites audiences to look again at Ms. Sinatra, who has been misunderstood and underrated for much of her career.

What Rosen neglects to mention here is that though some (not all) of Van Lear Rose is indeed in Jack White Drag with feebacky guitars and swamp drums and all, it’s also entirely composed of new songs written by Ms. Lynn. (I think Jack’s also the co-producer, not the sole producer, but I don’t have my copy around to check.) I don’t see any reason to try to make either one of these exciting rejuvenations look like a cynical attempt to showcase an aging icon in a setting that’s alien to her, but if you do feel so compelled, I’m afraid it’s Nancy who looks more like the novelty seeker.

A better point of comparison would have been to Marianne Faithfull, whose 2002 album Kissin’ Time likewise featured collaborations with Jarvis Cocker, as well as Blur, Beck and Billy Corgan. That one was a mixed bag, with only Cocker really coming off gold, but then again as sixties go-go girls go, Ms. Faithfull had far less distance to come back from - she renewed herself as a more vital performer than ever in the 1980s and never faded back out, while Nancy’s let her reputation age till she was so out of style she was in again. Yet in a way it’s not surprising they ended up making similar new-millennial bids by making connections with rockers a few generations down the line, because both MF and NS were boundary-testers in their heydays who crossed the line into haze in the twilight of the sixties, and ended up being godmothers to a certain kind of stylekicking noncomformity… And while I’d lay a little money on MF being the smarter of the two, Sinatra treasures trash in a fashion that’s a little more on-the-current-aesthetic-nose than Faithfull’s continuing post-bohemian journeys to the middle of the brow. It’s the Marianne who sang about blowjobs that the the art kids idolize, not the Marianne who sang Kurt Weill. That’s the kind of category error Nancy wouldn’t make.

So I can’t wait to hear Nancy Sinatra - especially the Calexico collaboration, which should conjure the sulphurous ambience of Lee Hazelwood but exactly.

As a supplement to this weekend’s piece on Owen Pallett of Les Mouches, the eyezapoppin’ Toronto music-scene-photojournal Aperture Enzyme has posted this violineriffic video of Owen in action in his loop-pedal-pumping secret solo identity, Final Fantasy. Check it. Also: Blocks has a sample Les Mouches MP3 (Carload of Whatever, from You’re Worth More to Me than 1,000 Christians) and interview outtakes are on the Zoilus griddle, servin’ up soon.

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