In the English-speaking world, we have an expression that advises against “gilding the lily.” The Chinese have a similar phrase that discourages “adding legs to a painting of a snake.” In other words, some things are already fine as they are, and one should resist the temptation to try and “improve” them. Up here in hard-bitten New York, we need jazz to make life considerably more bearable. But does the music, so essential to these rough-and-ready urban centers, serve any purpose in paradise?

For a number of years now, smooth jazz festivals have been proliferating across the Caribbean, on islands such as St. Lucia and Bermuda. Last fall, several nights of straight-ahead jazz were mounted on Anguilla, in the British West Indies – a rather rare sound in those waters. But just as smooth jazz has found a home on the beach, the more traditional sounds of swing and mainstream jazz are increasingly found on cruise ships.

The aquatic event that most of the better swing players are jazzed about is this November’s Swinging Jazz Cruise on the Radisson Seven Seas Navigator, which will depart from and return to Tampa, Fla., and travel to four ports in the Gulf of Mexico over a week. The lineup has been arranged by Mat Domber, whose label, Arbors Jazz Records, is one of the major success stories of the premodern jazz market in recent decades; most of the 17 musicians hired for the journey are affiliated with Arbors.

For jazz enthusiasts, the voyage promises a paradise of its own. There will be concerts and jam sessions going every afternoon and evening, continuously running jazz films, and seminars and discussions with the musicians, both formal and informal. Of course, there are also the customary shipboard pursuits and amenities – lectures and dancing, cooking lessons, bridge games, a full salon, spa, health club, and casino, and day activities on land when the ship is in port. But the main focus is on music.

“What I like best about the jazz cruise setup is the intimacy of the whole thing,” said veteran pianist Dick Hyman, who has been playing cruises since the 1980s. “Even more than jazz festivals or jazz parties, there’s very little separation between performer and audience.” On land, musicians generally repair to other clubs when they’re not playing. “Here, there’s no place else to go, so you just pull up a deck chair and chat with other fans and listen to other musicians. It’s one of the most pleasurable professional or personal experiences I’ve ever had, and a very pleasant way to spend a week.”

Such congeniality calls for a specific type of musician. Most contemporary swing players, fortunately, enjoy mixing it up with fans and listeners. The irascible, anti-social types who refuse to consort with lay people, play requests, or sign autographs do not typically get hired (and certainly aren’t rehired) to play jazz cruises. Even though the musicians are generally very willing to chat, they usually do more than just gossip. Many of the musicians on board, like Mr. Hyman, clarinetist Ken Peplowski, and trumpeter composer Randy Sandke, are scholars as much as players, and many of the gabbing sessions between player and listener wind up being informal jazz history classes. Some of the more venerable figures, such as drummer Eddie Locke, clarinetist Kenny Davern, and Mr. Hyman – who has worked with such legends as, respectively, Coleman Hawkins, Jack Teagarden, Benny Goodman, and Charlie Parker, to name only a few – can talk about such things from a first-person point of view, since they have not only studied jazz history but lived it.

A considerable amount of historical lore will also be dispensed via the ship’s closed-circuit television system. One whole channel will be turned over to Don Wolff, a longtime jazz broadcaster for the St. Louis station KMOX-AM and one of the world’s premier collectors of jazz on film and video. There will be 12 hours of jazz programming from Mr. Wolff’s collection on each of the seven days of the trip. “Many of the passengers are expert fans who have seen all the jazz video that’s commercially available,” said Mr. Wolff, who has already shared his archives on some 12 previous cruises. “So I make the effort to find stuff that virtually no one has ever seen before.”

The big thrills will be two programs unknown to this longtime fan, both from the early 1960s and featuring Coleman Hawkins. The first is a very rare piece of television footage teaming the Hawk with another centennial figure with whom he rarely worked, the legendary Earl “Fatha” Hines. The other is a surprising find: Producer Norman Granz rarely allowed his famous Jazz At the Philharmonic concerts to be recorded, yet Mr. Wolff has found footage from Europe of a JATP show starring Dizzy Gillespie, James Moody, Clark Terry, and Hawkins again. Mr. Wolff is also screening a series of episodes from a large form foreign documentary series that amounts to a European answer to Ken Burns’s epic “Jazz.”

All the players on the trip have worked cruise ships before, and they all have their favorite stories about the experience. Many stories involve occasions when the waters got rough and the boat began pitching and rocking – something that almost never happens, fortunately, in the Gulf of Mexico. “The worst thing that can go wrong is when the piano starts rolling away from you,” said Mr. Hyman, “although I’ve almost never experienced that.” Trumpeter Warren Vache reported, “There was only one trip I’ve ever made where it got really rough, and that was on the Mediterranean, and the ship danced the samba all the way from Nice to Morocco. I can tell you it doesn’t help the stomach or the mind to close your eyes. It was the only time I’ve missed a set due to sea sickness, and they docked my pay check!” Mr. Hyman noted, “It’s far more likely that your piano will go out of tune, which is a common complaint among shipboard pianists. Usually, however, on a musical-centric cruise like this, the producer will hire a full-time piano tuner to come along and tune all the keyboards daily.”

So, does jazz serve any purpose in paradise? For me, admittedly, it’s a loaded question. For those of us who love the music, jazz is an essential part of the very definition of paradise, and no place on Earth, however tropical and beautiful, could hope to qualify as such without it.