Jon Batiste's Jazz Club at Baha Mar Is Reviving the Local Music Scene in the Bahamas

Musician Jon Batiste opened a jazz club at Baha Mar in the Bahamas — here's why it's a game changer.

Jon Batiste preforming at the grand opening of Jon Batiste’s Jazz Club at Baha Mar.

Jon Batiste likes warm weather, so when the Oscar- and Grammy-awarded music artist got a call last spring about opening a jazz club in the Bahamas, he hopped on the next flight from Brooklyn.

He hadn’t spent much time in the Bahamas before, and soon found himself falling in love with more than just the subtropical climate. The music of the Bahamas reminded him of the rhythms he heard growing up in New Orleans. “There’s such a kinship between both,” Batiste told Travel + Leisure. “The sound of what I hear when I go here to a Junkanoo is the same feeling I get at Mardi Gras,” he added, referring to the Caribbean festival held in the Bahamas.

View of the clubs VIP area.

Courtesy of Baha Mar

Since departing from The Late Show With Stephen Colbert in 2022, he was open to connecting creatively with the global African community. “The African diaspora came through the Bahamas, Jamaica, Bahia, and Cuba — and went up to New Orleans,” he said. “New Orleans is the northernmost tip of the Caribbean, in many ways.”

It didn’t take much convincing after that. In January 2025, he unveiled Jon Batiste’s Jazz Club at Baha Mar to a crowd of 300 VIPs that included The Daily Show host Jon Stewart, local musicians, former NFL players, and Bahamian dignitaries.

The bar area of the jazz club.

Courtesy of Baha Mar

The 12,900-square-foot club is located on the casino floor of Baha Mar, the mega-luxury resort in Nassau that also includes three hotels, a water park, a golf course, an aquarium, and more restaurants than many small cities. The club’s 278-seat space is as glitzy and shiny as an awards-ceremony stage, and was designed with nods to Bahamas’ historic jazz clubs.

During the 1940s and 50s, clubs with names like The Cat and Fiddle, The Silver Slipper, The Banana Boat, and The Buena Vista fueled a homegrown jazz scene that attracted local artists and international stars like Louis Armstrong, Harry Belafonte, and Nina Simone. Those clubs are long gone, Batiste said, as the Bahamas became better known for its tourist-friendly beaches, rather than its music. “We struggle with a similar thing in New Orleans, where the industry of tourism conceals who we actually are, rather than revealing it,” he said.

The jazz club's main stage.

Courtesy of Baha Mar

He sees his sleek jazz club as a way of introducing Bahamian music culture to new audiences. After all, he credits much of his own musical journey to such clubs. “For more than half of my life, I was always in jazz clubs,” he said. “My first gig in New York was at one of the oldest jazz clubs in the country. And that was when I was 17, and a student at Juilliard. The earliest experiences I had were in venues like this.”

“Place is always tied to the song anyway,” he added. Indeed, Batiste approaches travel in a similar way that he does music. He flies a lot for work, but whenever he and his wife — the best-selling author Suleika Jaouad — plan a vacation together, it’s more about finding a groove, rather than dropping pins on a map or collecting experiences. “We don’t travel to check something off a list,” he said. “We try to catch a vibe.”

That was certainly true for two of his most recent trips: hiking to a mountaintop near Lausanne, Switzerland, and driving in an RV from the desert village of Marfa, Texas, to the lush, arts-and-crafts town of Ojai, California. “I’m happy to go wherever, as long as it’s with my wife,” he added with a wide smile.

One thing he never does, however, is check a bag when flying. “It’s great to be able to travel light,” he said. “And as Denzel Washington likes to say, ‘I’m leaving here with something.’ If you don’t know that meme, look it up.”

In preparation for the club’s opening, Batiste spent about a month at Baha Mar, staying at the Grand Hyatt, and his ties to the local music and art community have deepened. Does he and his wife want to spend more time in the Bahamas? “My wife wants to, and she's the boss,” he said. “She grew up not in a cold climate, and I grew up in New Orleans, so we really don't like the winter.”

“She paints as well, and we’ve gone to a lot of galleries,” he added. ”We made lots of friends already.”