'It's an obvious concept," says George Evans, "but an obviously good concept." The Toronto singer is talking about his latest production, the CD Here Come The Boys: A Canadian Crooner Collection (Maximum Jazz), which offers one track each to 15 male vocalists from across the country. That's Evans himself, track two, singing a stylish Lullaby of the Leaves.

The concept -- to give credit where credit's due, as Evans immediately does, over decaf in a Forest Hill coffee bar -- belongs to another Toronto producer and musician, pianist Bill King, the man behind 2002's Real Divas (7 Arts Entertainment), which celebrated the distaff side of the Canadian jazz scene.

Evans, who's a staunch advocate when it comes to singers, no matter their gender or nationality, quickly came up with a list of men who deserved similar exposure. At 41, he suggests, he's far enough along in his own career to be "secure and confident in what I do, so that I'm not threatened by supporting other people in their work." He's also by nature gregarious, an engagingly articulate fellow who punctuates a conversation with hearty laughs, wry smiles and an occasional twinkle of the eye.

"There was a nice group of singers I knew and respected from competing with them for years," he explains. "At the same time I was wondering why we weren't competing more, why there weren't more opportunities. I knew that these guys had all been growing and developing, becoming better singers and better performers. I also saw many of them drift by the wayside -- go into government, finance or whatever else it is that a boy singer does when there aren't any bookings."

This is the subtheme of Here Come the Boys, specifically that Canada's male singers, and male singers in and around jazz more generally, could use a break. Harry Connick Jr. and, just lately, Jamie Cullum aside, the ladies -- Cassandra, Dee Dee, Diana, Joni, Jane, Norah and the rest -- have been getting all the attention for years now.

The men, Evans among them, could do little more than look on, noses pressed to the proverbial window, like kids who hadn't been invited to the party. "We kept working," he notes, "thinking 'It's a vocal revival, there's room for us now, so let's keep on singing, people are interested.' But this is a male dominated world -- the record industry, the journalists involved -- and the straight, white male community has an interest in, and understanding of, the chick singer's place in that world, while dismissing where the boy singer fits in."

And where does the boy singer fit in? Evans is a good one to ask, not simply for his own experience but for the historical perspective that he can offer as someone who has studied singers in the jazz world very closely -- closely enough to have been asked to select performances for compilation CDs celebrating the work of Ella Fitzgerald, Astrid Gilberto, Billie Holiday, Anita O'Day, Carmen McRae, Sarah Vaughan and Dinah Washington in the Verve Music Group's recent reissue program The Diva Series.

Actually, it's not clear at all where the boy singer fits in. Consider Here Come the Boys, which Evans admits is "not a jazz record." Nor, though, is it really a crooner's record. "No," he agrees, "we've appropriated a word. There's no appropriate expression for 'male singer' except 'male singer.' Girl singers in jazz are so prevalent that there are many words to describe them: the chick singer, the canary, the songbird, the thrush, the diva. . . . Men are so underused that there isn't even vocabulary for us."

There are of course some "crooner" types on Here Come the Boys, including Kenny Colman, John Labelle and Tim Tamashiro. There are also a few jazzier singers -- Evans is one, Denzal Sinclaire another -- as well as stylists as distinct as the bluesy Ted Hawkins and the Michael Bolton-ish John Neudorf. And, for the record, the "boys" aren't really boys. Most fall into the 30-to-50 age range; Gene Lees is the senior man at 76.

"It was important to find a place to put all of us," Evans says, speaking to the compilation's inclusiveness, "because quite frequently we sing differently than the girls do. We're often balladeers; we're often R&B-tinged, or we're more like cabaret singers. Some of us have crossed over from the theatre and some of us cross over into pop."

Evans himself is a case in point. He trained for the theatre in his native Cincinnati, Ohio -- voice, dance, acting -- and initially studied jazz recordings as an easy way of picking up the standard repertoire. "The plan was just to learn Gershwin, Porter and Berlin," he remembers, "so I acquired songbook recordings by Ella Fitzgerald and Rosemary Clooney."

But one thing led to another, and one singer to the next. Meanwhile, Evans was trying to find a place for himself in the world of theatre, something that didn't happen -- he says now, laughing -- until he was cast "as a sleazy, alcoholic, chain-smoking lounge singer in The 1940s Radio Hour and subsequently as a sleazy, sexaholic singer in Evita."

So it was, when he moved from New York to Montreal in 1991, that he changed his career's direction. He developed a weekly radio show, I Feel a Song Coming on, for the McGill University radio station CKUT-FM, and began singing in local jazz clubs. His first two CDs, Moodswing and I'm All Smiles . . . Live from Studio 13, or his own M-Swing label, date to this period.

His third and fourth M-Swing releases, From Moment to Moment and Eyes for You, followed his arrival Toronto in 1999. Each CD has taken him a little further in the direction of the jazz singer.

"You have the risk-takers whose goal is to deconstruct and reconstruct," Evans observes, defining the far end of the spectrum on which he and the other vocalists on Here Come the Boys work. "And then you have the singers whose job is to interpret and reinterpret, using the traditional song structure and being faithful to lyric and faithful to melody."

Evans currently finds himself in "a strange middle ground that doesn't appeal 100-per-cent to either end of the spectrum. The cabaret people and the theatre community are challenged by the risks and deviances I've taken; they're off put by someone who will sing a different melodic line after first rendering it perfectly or who will change the context of something that was a ballad and make it a rhythm tune."

Of course it's precisely this interpretive freedom that has brought Evans, by his own admission, "closer to where the jazz people at the other end of the spectrum are starting to 'get' that there's something going on here they can respond to."

For that, he's again quick to give credit where credit's due -- to the jazz musicians with whom he has worked, first in Montreal and now in Toronto. "I've learned from these generous, giving, older, curmudgeonly musicians, like [the late Toronto drummer] Jerry Fuller, how to give and take, how to give people space, how to listen to what they're giving you . . . and to take the chance of being wrong, if wrong is what happens on the road to being right and to singing from a jazz place."

George Evans appears in Toronto tonight at the Boiler Room in the Distillery District and on Aug. 18 at the Montreal Bistro.