This is an experimental story that dwells in the connections between academic jazz programs and the global cruise industry, the ideological and affective attachments people maintain between these two institutions in the twenty-first century, and what is at stake in their naming and contemplation.3 Using disruptively prosed rhythms and modular form, it attempts a worlding of everyday cruise life and the soundings, mobilities, and affective geographies of early-career musicians living at sea, profoundly unmoored from the places and networks in which jazz is typically thought to flourish.
Narrating this story means disrupting the silence of jazz studies on a political economy that has implicated generations of university-trained musicians ever since the turn of the 1970s, which witnessed the coterminous rise of college jazz education in the United States and multinational, corporatized cruise tourism.4 From the former emerged a musical workforce particularly suited for the latter's burgeoning demand for...
