Jam Cruise 22 had not yet left the port the first time I saw someone almost die.
The MSC Divina—an 1,100-foot mass of sunbaked white metal that first set sail 14 years ago—was still lashed to land in Miami when I decided to try one of its dozen-plus hot tubs, before the 3,300 other passengers had the same brilliant idea. It was early February, the Saturday before the Super Bowl, so I was talking about football with four fellow hot-water enthusiasts when a sixth started to join us. Standing at the tub’s edge, he struggled with his shirt, wrestling it so strenuously that his swim trunks were hanging halfway down his ass before he finally turned toward the water. Unbothered, he climbed in, nodded, pulled his headphones over his ears, and closed his eyes.
Every three minutes, one of us would notice that the stranger had nodded off and was slipping under the bubbles, his headphones taking on water. We’d tap him on the shoulder, ask if he was OK, receive a lopsided smile, and repeat the cycle. It took us a moment to hear him finally thrashing beneath the water, his commotion drowned by the drone of the jets. A woman from Massachusetts hooked him by his armpit and tugged until he’d surfaced, struggling to cough his lungs free of chlorine. A lifeguard rushed over, pulled him from the tub, and encouraged him to stand up slowly. The guard helped him dry off, get dressed, and offered to take him somewhere—his room, the infirmary, back home? As they toddled away, the lifeguard glanced back at us over his shoulder and half-grimaced, half-grinned: It’s too early for this shit, his face seemed to say, but have a great time, anyway.
I assumed then that this is simply how life would be on Jam Cruise, a five-day trip around a tiny sliver of the Atlantic with 30 bands that very loosely land under the already wide umbrella of “jam.” A little more than two decades ago, Jam Cruise helped inaugurate the now rather large industry of music-centric exotic vacations—that is, bands and fans together on a boat or at some warm resort for several days. I’d never been to either, so when an invitation arrived, I accepted. After the whole drowning ordeal just an hour after I’d been on board, I expected that maybe I was in much too deep. Maybe the friend who had called this the “boof boat” was being too lighthearted?
The next morning, as we neared Cuba, headed south, I could hear a stranger telling my wife, Tina, a story across a table in the byzantine cafeteria. I sat down, expecting to commandeer conversational duties for Tina, the household introvert, who had agreed to join me on Jam Cruise only because it included a big gym and two beach stops. Instead, I went speechless: Here was the man who nearly drowned, wearing the same hat and headphones but now bright-eyed and beaming. He didn’t recognize me, so he introduced himself as George, saying that he had picked the boat this year over seeing Phish at a resort in Mexico because his recent ex was there, not here. “Don’t date a Phish chick, bro,” he said, laughing and slapping the table so hard his tower of buffet plates shuddered. “Those bitches are crazy.”
We soon told George goodbye. Tina didn’t believe me when I insisted that was the guy I’d helped rescue. How did he look so healthy and happy? In the 16 hours I’d been on the boat, multiple people had told me Jam Cruise was a special place to be, a miracle in motion where strangers met and got married, where unexpected collaborations blew minds, where bad things just didn’t happen. Wait a second: Were they…right?
For better and certainly worse, they were. After Jam Cruise 22 embarked aboard the MSC Divina, I didn’t see anyone else almost die. I made a few friends. I watched the Patriots lose the Super Bowl in an auditorium of people who hated the Patriots. I witnessed moments of community that were often funny and sometimes deeply moving. I saw several moments of music—the first two Medeski Martin & Wood sets in four years; a windswept late-night Taper’s Choice show so astral I wondered if they were trying to launch themselves off the ship; a righteous organ trio called Parlor Greens playing so hard in a little room I briefly pondered the ship’s structural integrity—that actually felt transcendent.
But as the days wore on, I began to feel like this vacuum of absolute happiness was an awful lie, oblivious to the actual world in which we live and built for people who could afford to ignore everything that mattered more than their good time. Almost invariably, the music force fed us a sort of naïve joy, where everything was beautiful and pure ebullience and escape were only a few blaring horn lines or chromatic synthesizer arpeggios or basic soul remixes away. I did not board the MSC Divina on a sunny Saturday in Miami anticipating I’d spend a major chunk of the next five days thinking about the responsibility of music and music programming amid a rising tide of domestic authoritarianism and AI anti-art. But as with the drugs most everyone seemed to have smuggled on board, Jam Cruise’s results will inevitably vary.
Before we head for those distant shores, though, I must dispel any notions of cool and admit that my interest in Jam Cruise was not born of irony or obligation. I wanted to go, asked to go. Several years ago, family lured me to my first cruise, despite the fit I threw about Covid-19 and climate change and American largesse at large. (I am a very fun person, ask anyone.) Almost instantly, though, I fell under that first ship’s spell, at my sudden ability to relax because there was really nothing else to do. I indeed contracted Covid but still went on a second cruise, one year later, during which I again contracted Covid. Also, to my great surprise, maybe I love jam bands? After being a teenaged fan, I fell largely out of that world for two decades. But I’ve recently realized that so much interesting work is being done at the movement’s weirder fringes and that it’s shaped so many scenes and musicians I love. I’m fascinated these days by the prospects of what I might have missed and, better yet, what is still to come.
Here’s the thing, however, about Jam Cruise in 2026: The lineup was mostly not jam bands. In the first few years, the names you may recognize even if “jamming” is entirely anathema to you were indeed on board—Sound Tribe Sector 9, Bob Weir, Perpetual Groove, Keller Williams, Disco Biscuits, Umphrey’s McGee, multiple Les Claypool projects. (Diplo, Bassnectar, and Pretty Lights all made early appearances as well.) But lots of those bands and their peers have either broken up or broken containment, becoming too popular to be paired with others on a ship where the biggest space holds only the ship’s capacity of 3,400 . And as one organizer told me, there simply aren’t enough unit-moving young jam bands to fill the big ship’s manifest.
Jam Cruise’s lineup, therefore, has morphed by necessity into a kind of polyglot happy-music aesthetic. The Nevilles of New Orleans share billing with those aforementioned Biscuits. The emphatic funk of Lettuce runs parallel to the neo-soul jazz of The New Mastersounds. The Australian keyboardist Lachy Doley abandons all restraint at his keyboard while the blues-rock wunderkind Grace Bowers does the same with her guitar.
In five nights, I spent up to 12 hours each day watching bands play, and I saw at least a little bit of almost every band on the boat. I can count, however, the number of times I saw bands allow for any emotional valence that wasn’t some variation on pep and sunshine on two hands, maybe even one. When Medeski Martin & Wood stepped onto a stage for the first time in four years as the ship set sail from Grand Turk at sunset, they immediately clawed their way into skittering jazz and rhythmic misdirection and abrasive textures. The next night, the saxophonist Skerik joined them onstage and played like John Zorn in search of a grudge fuck. These were two of the only times Jam Cruise’s programming allowed for confusion, misdirection, uncertainty, maybe even rage. It was a welcome reminder of reality on a boat mostly searching for oblivion.
The counterargument is apparent and immediate, of course: It’s a cruise. Can’t a boat sailing to beautiful sunny beaches amid American winter just be happy? Why shouldn’t the sounds, the vibe, the everything be about escape, like Margaritaville with better guitar solos? Can we not just have fun, man? “It’s partially the bands themselves, right? Just their natural sound and vibe,” one organizer told me a few days after the cruise ended. “Also, it’s hard to be melancholy or unhappy on Jam Cruise. You get onboard and swept away into this energy that is infectious and positive. Even a melancholic song has a way of being elevated here.”
Look, I’m not asking for a dungeon synth or darkwave room or for all the Grateful Dead covers to be replaced by Elliott Smith tunes. I don’t think there needs to be a lecture on the righteousness of Fugazi’s politics and how they’d never play Jam Cruise. I’m not asking for Saul Williams to sit in with bands rather than the avuncular Chali 2na, who always had the biggest smile whether stepping onto a stage or into a buffet line.
It is, after all, a cruise ship full of “jam bands” and their fans, sailing through a string of beautiful days; it should be fun, and it often was. Almost every time I started speaking to a stranger, they’d reach into a pocket and hand me a sticker they’d made just for the occasion—“My Other Ride is a Type 2 Jam Vehicle,” “Jam Cruise 22: Sleep is Optional,” “Funk on the High Seas.” Every night presented a different costume theme, so I saw human sharks and constellations and a couple dressed like the urinal and the young woman sitting on said urinal from the cover of Foreigner’s Head Games. Ad hoc bands played late into the night on the ship’s decks, and the energy reserves for dance parties seemed infinite. People raged, so good for people.
But there was so little tension, so little acknowledgement that art could represent anything else than a good time. Only once did I hear a musician, the saxophonist Karl Denson, explicitly acknowledge the shit show back on the shore that most of us call home: “We’re not going to let the motherfuckers fuck us,” he shouted into a dark theater before essentially explaining the premise of mutual aid. Denson is a Black man and, for over a decade now, a Rolling Stone, but he spoke as someone more worried about what we had to defend than what he had to lose. On the boat, Denson was an island.
Again, that willingness to ignore the real world permeated the music, too, all so bright and blithe it started to feel like a skin irritant. On the final night, the jam world’s ascendant young buzz band, Eggy, felt edgeless to the point of algorithmic, with the most transgressive thing about them perhaps being the way their name might make the most sensitive vegan feel. By the end of that night, Lotus sounded to me like Explosions in the Sky for people who believed that the only reason to play a video game is to win, that the possibility of failure is only a design flaw. Even Galactic—one of the most fascinating and enterprising American bands of the last 30 years and a veritable institution of an embattled New Orleans—seemed strangely milquetoast on board, like their music was marching for nothing in particular when it could have said so much.
This baseline hum of happiness made me think of the Trump administration’s approach to arts programming and AI’s inclination to be merely agreeable. The president and his people don’t want art that confronts the worst and most teachable aspects of our past or present, and he’s doing a fine job of gutting the institutions that take that work seriously. And most of the popular content produced by AI seems engineered to make you feel like you’re floating, unmoored from the uncomfortable realities of our world. The bot wants to be your friend, and its byproducts want to make you feel nice.
Arts programming will increasingly need to confront the world as it is, not merely as we want it to be. Complexity is our human virtue. This year at least, Jam Cruise’s escapist utopia felt like a perverse form of nihilism, where everything that didn’t make you feel good could be ignored. That is not the world I want to live in. It is a fabrication that, after five days, made me miss everyone and everything else we’d left behind, as flawed as it all can be.
Early on the third day, the boat docked on the south side of Grand Turk, a British territory that has been exploited for centuries for its salt and its geographic usefulness during the Cold War. The cruise industry represents a major windfall for the island’s taxi drivers, bars, and restaurants, especially on the island’s southern end. But nearly a quarter of the residents still live below the global poverty line, while more than half of them cannot afford basic household goods. The ramshackle houses, the dirt roads, the salt ponds that have been left to sit like vacant lots: These were all reminders of the extractive economy and colonialism, of the way people have always shown up, taken what they’ve needed, and left the rest to anyone who bothered to stick around. By and large, that’s what we were doing, too.
There was one exception. During Jam Cruise’s first year, some of the cruisers recognized that their pleasure ride contributed to waste in the world and that they were using the scarce resources of others for their own amusement. Their do-it-yourself greening initiative steadily led to a nonprofit, Positive Legacy, that has generated $1.5 million in environmental and social grants since 2011.
When we docked in Grand Turk, more than 100 cruisers who had each paid $125 for a ticket didn’t spend the day at the beach or the bar but instead at a primary school, building a playground and gardening and painting. Their tickets covered half of the $32,000 project, while Positive Legacy footed the rest of the bill. Sure, it’s a little bit of a luxury tax for those privileged enough to pay for it, but it was something real, at least, for a boat trip that often felt like nothing more than an enormous “Good Vibes Only” billboard moving through the sea at 19 knots.
As we dropped the ropes and headed back into the ocean, Medeski Martin & Wood began playing, shirking grooves and easy sentiments for something unruly and maybe even unsettling. It felt honest and complex and true. But as night fell and we moved further from Grand Turk, the music drifted again into endless merriment. We could ignore the real world, with all its problems and divisions and big feelings. For a few more days, at least, we could just have fun and sun and songs about nothing, all aboard our floating mirage of paradise.