American Jazz

American Jazz is the third of the modern riverboats American Cruise Lines began building in 2018, and the second of them to carry a fifth deck of staterooms. She is 328 feet long, 60 feet on the beam, draws eight feet, and takes 180 guests in 99 staterooms, every one of which has a private balcony.

She was handed over in 2020. It is worth pausing on that date: the entire rest of the cruise industry spent that year with its ships laid up and its newbuild schedule in ruins. American Cruise Lines, building small US-flagged vessels for a domestic market at a yard it effectively has to itself, took delivery on time.

Her early years were spent on the inland rivers rather than out west, and that is where the one incident on her record happened. In July 2021, running Memphis to Nashville, she went outside the channel and grounded on a shoal near Canton, Kentucky, where the Cumberland opens into Lake Barkley. She sat there better than two days. The Coast Guard stood up a unified command with the state, the county and the line; all 120 passengers were taken off and bussed to Nashville, and a salvage contractor pulled her free that Friday afternoon. No injuries were reported, no pollution, and she went back to work. It is a fair thing to know about a shallow-draft boat on a working river, and it is not a fair reason to avoid her.

What a “modern riverboat” is

This is not a paddlewheeler. The line runs four of those as well and they are a different product entirely, sternwheel, Victorian styling, a nod to the nineteenth century. The modern riverboats are the opposite: a flat-sided, squared-off, contemporary hull with a five-story glass atrium up the middle, an elevator to every passenger deck, and floor-to-ceiling glass in every cabin.

The one genuinely clever piece of engineering is the bow. It opens hydraulically and puts out a retractable gangway, so the boat can nose into a riverbank and land 180 people where there is no dock, no pier and no port authority at all. On the Columbia and the Snake, where the interesting stops are small towns and the occasional stretch of nothing, that is the feature that decides the itinerary rather than the other way around.

Aboard: the River Lounge for the daily cocktail hour and evening program, a Sky Lounge at the top, a pilothouse space, a study, a bow terrace, small rooms for reading and cards, one restaurant with open seating and food cooked to order, and the Back Porch Café for grilled lunches. Snacks and drinks are out around the clock. Cabins run from 250 square feet to a 615-square-foot Grand Suite.

American-built, and why it matters here

She was built at Chesapeake Shipbuilding in Salisbury, Maryland, is registered in the United States and is crewed by Americans. On a river that is entirely inside one country this is less about legal loopholes than about the fact that nobody else can do it: a foreign-flagged vessel cannot carry passengers between two US ports, so the domestic river market belongs to US-built boats or to nobody. Practically, it means an all-American crew, no passport, no visa, and no foreign call bolted onto the schedule to keep the lawyers happy.

Where she actually sails

Portland, Oregon, and nothing but Portland; every voyage on her calendar starts there. What varies is how far she takes you from it.

The standard product is the eight-night Columbia and Snake Rivers cruise, one-way and upstream from Portland to Clarkston, Washington: Astoria near the mouth, then Kalama, The Dalles, Richland, Pendleton and Lewiston, working up through the Columbia Gorge and the lock chambers into the wheat country and finishing at the foot of Hells Canyon. That is the week most people mean by a Columbia River cruise, and it is the larger part of her year.

What distinguishes her from the other four modern riverboats on this river is how much of the other thing she runs. A large minority of her departures are the fortnight-long National Parks and Legendary Rivers itinerary, and no sister on the Columbia leans on it as heavily. That one starts identically and then abandons the boat: the Gorge and the Snake by ship, then overland through Glacier National Park, Yellowstone and Grand Teton, ending at Jackson, Wyoming. It is a coach-and-lodge tour with a river cruise attached, and it needs booking with that understood; the second week has no riverboat in it at all.

She keeps a short Columbia River Gorge loop out of Portland and back on the books as well, under a week, with Hood River on it. It is the one way to sample this river without giving up a fortnight or a full nine days. Her season is the river’s: spring through the beginning of November, then winter lay-up.

Who she suits

People who want the Lewis and Clark route done thoroughly and slowly, with a balcony to watch it from. The eight-night version is enough for the landscape to change from rainforest at Astoria to bare basalt and wheat at Clarkston, which a long weekend on the Gorge does not manage. Fares cover drinks with meals, excursions and gratuities.

She is wrong for anyone in a hurry and anyone traveling with children. She is also the wrong booking if you want two weeks on a boat; her long itinerary buys you Yellowstone, not more river, and people who read “fifteen nights” and picture fifteen nights afloat are the ones who end up disappointed. And she is a boat, not a ship: the entertainment is a lecturer and a pianist, the pool does not exist, and if the vessel itself is meant to be the attraction you will run out of it by the fourth day.