Anyone who knows me knows that I don't truck with covers or cover bands. But the blues and jazz are different. There are writers in the blues and jazz realm whose songs' solid frameworks are the monkey bars from which musicians can swing. There is so much room to go nuts on tunes from the great American songbook, that an artist can discover and develop his or her own voice on the skeleton that is one of these classics. The problem is everybody's done it, and done it, and is still doing it. The pages of that songbook are getting tattered. It's time to give George & Ira, Jerry & Mike, Irving, Jerome, and Johnny a little break. It's time for some new royalty to be introduced and acknowledged. My nomination is Tom Waits.

As I said in the Jazz Fest program and in CITY's Jazz Fest special, tackling anything by Tom Waits is like wrestling an alligator: do it well and you've got a new pair of shoes; screw up and you're dead. It's a dangerous trip to a place so unique only one man lives there.

A few artists have tried it successfully, like Canadian chanteuse Holly Cole, and John Hammond. Some have tried for God-only-knows-what reason. Scarlet honey, you're beautiful baby, but lay off the Waits.

Which brings me to St. Petersburg, Russia's Billy's Band, the hand's down best act of the whole goddamned festival. I saw both sets and wish there had been a third

Looking like dirty little brothers that Groucho, Chico, Harpo, and Zeppo left behind, or perhaps derelict vaudevillians, Billy's Band expertly covered Waits and performed its own stuff in that Tin Pan Alley, drunk-in-the-pulpit, Beat noir calamity Waits works in. Bassist and singer Billy Novik is clearly influenced by Waits, but honestly it was more than a mere pastiche. It was a brilliant interpretation -- bass, guitar, accordion, saxophone, and assorted shit that got beat on -- of the newest member in the great American songbook (if I have my way). Novik's between-song banter full of fractured English and wry with was charming as hell.