Jungle Jam
Jaco, Costa Rica
January 17-20

Many a festival promoter has opened shop based on the imagined principal that if you build it, they will come. Not always true. However, throw a jam fest in the middle of a sketchy jungle-shack beach town in a third-world country – bait it with the drummer of the Grateful Dead and the bassist from The Allman Brothers Band – and even without the full experience of either of those bands, enough people will indeed come, shake their bones and go home raving about it all.

While Cloud 9 Adventures – with Jam Cruise, Holidaze, Panic en La Playa and Strings and Sol all under their wing –still holds the gold standard for destination festivals, Jungle Jam wins the award for best boutique, destination festival of its size. It’s a small-scale event with big-scale thinking. For a crowd barely a couple hundred people deep, Jungle Jam offers a couple bells and whistles (fire dancers, face painting, an opening-night luau) without any of the corporate bullshit so prevalent now at the bigger events. This one’s still organic. And pure – or, rather, pura vida.

Costa Rica is supposed to be a destination until itself and, indeed, many of its sights are world-class. But the town of Jaco, where Jungle Jam is held, is like a Cental American version of Tijuana, complete with hookers, thieves and thugs. Throw in Jungle Jam, and you throw hippies in the mix. This makes for a mixed crowd during the late nights, which spill over into the seedy downtown strip including a couple shows at the Monkey Bar – a hooker pick-up joint. Really, a brothel minus the rooms. Zach Deputy played there. Damn right he was doing the hustle. And pulling it off better than any of the $40 whores lining the bar, ready to get down with anyone who would buy them a drink, especially if they were stupid enough to carry their wallet in their back pocket.

Don’t be fooled by the Jaco address, however. The festival is based a couple miles down the road at the seemingly isolated, and picture-postcard worthy, Doce Lunas resort and spa. Owned and operated by a Deadhead, the resort is the kind you daydream about when you’re stuck in a cubicle, in the thick of a winter snowstorm, wondering just how many vacation days you have left. It’s the type of place you’d want to stay at even if there wasn’t a music festival taking place in the quad between cabanas.

Like most destination festivals, Jungle Jam doesn’t offer a lineup that reads down the page. Instead it offers a few really high-quality bands, in high quantity throughout the weekend. And it also lives up to its name more than any other jam band fest since Jam Cruise – everybody jams with everybody. This year’s lineup was anchored by the annual appearance of the BK3 – Bill Kreutzmann’s trio featuring Oteil Burbridge on bass and Scott Murawski on guitar – and was bolstered by daily sets from Ryan Montbleau Band, Zach Deputy and Max Creek. Oteil, on loan from the Allman Brothers Band, was there on official business as BK3’s bassist. But he moonlit as the festival’s artist in residence, sitting in with nearly every band on the main stage during nearly every set. “I love it here,” he told Relix at the end of the weekend. “This is like my New Year’s Eve.”

Photo by Britt Nemeth

Of course, it helps that his room at Doce Lunas was just 20 feet from the stage. “Usually, at festivals, I don’t really play with all the bands,” he said. “But my room is right there. If anybody says my name from stage, I’ll bring my bass and play.” Turns out, he doesn’t even need to bring his bass – Oteil sat in on percussion, drums and keyboards at various moments throughout the event. And when he wasn’t scat singing or performing a song that he learned on the fly, Oteil could be caught in the pool or around the grounds, engaging as often as being engaged.

Also: another one of the weekend’s biggest assets turned out to be Ryan Montbleau. He had many fans already in the audience, but by the end of the weekend, everyone was a Montbleau fan. There were times he stopped the crowd dead in its feet, such as during his solo acoustic rendition of “75 and Sunny.” And then other times he had even crotchety old men up and dancing, like when he kicked off the festivities on Friday with a cover of Taj Mahal’s “Nobody’s Business But My Own.” ( “You have to play Taj down here,” he told Relix at one point. “It just fits the environment so well.” And he was right. It does.)

Zach Deputy also won over any remaining holdouts by the end of the weekend, with his likeable demeanor and musical slight of hand. On Friday night, he handled the late night from a gringo bar called Los Amigos, operated by a trio of Floridian expats. A taste of Fort Lauderdale in Central America in more ways than one. And it was ladies night. But as soon as Zach brought up Max Creek’s Marc Mercier – and then some other Max Creekers after that – ladies night quickly turned into hippie night. Deputy also performed at a beachfront bar during a surf competition on a nearby beach (Playa Hermosa) on Saturday afternoon, and closed out the final jam of the entire event, playing the late-night at the Monkey Bar and then hosting his own after show at a hotel hot tub party down the street.

As for headliners, BK3, they delivered the most psychedelic set of the weekend and they delivered it to the weekend’s biggest audience. Bill Kreutzmann demonstrated, plain as day, why he was the engine that drove the Grateful Dead’s rhythms, with his instantly recognizable drumming. And with Burbridge and Murawski in the boiler room, the band brought the heat and were the perfect anchor for a festival with the word “jam” in its name. I mean, they jammed. Long, hard, with enough intent to make it transcendent without ever letting it merely meander. Predictably, they tore through some of the Grateful Dead songbook, hitting on favorites such as “Bird Song → the Other One,” “Sugaree,” and “Help on the Way” with a “Slipknot” and “Franklin’s Tower” in there somewhere as well. Sometimes they were joined by guests, like Marc Mercier and an unknown spoken-word poet. But as a power trio, they reminded anyone paying attention why Kreutzmann was such an integral and irreplaceable part of the Grateful Dead’s sound. After all, BK3 was not only the most psychedelic band of the weekend, but they also remain the most psychedelic project that Kreutzmann’s been a part of since the Grateful Dead proper.

Naturally, the all-star jam also lived up to its name. Starting with a drum jam that was preconceived and instigated by Oteil, a rotating cast of the weekend’s musicians all put in their two cents – sometimes on their usual instruments, sometimes on foreign ones – for a string of all-star classics that included the Band’s “The Weight,” Stevie Wonder’s “Boogie on Reggae Woman,” and the Grateful Dead’s “Shakedown Street.”

While its location two hours south of the San Jose airport in Costa Rica makes Jungle Jam one of the toughest festivals for just about anyone to get to, anyone who does make it has the luxury of patting themselves on the back when the airport shuttle comes to take them away at the end of it. Good work, kids. After all, it’s a jam… and it’s in the jungle. And that adds up to a place you’d rather be.

You’ll be hearing more about this festival in the years to come. Stay tuned.