A quick Pop Eye pop quiz: who here has heard of Lotus? Hands up if you know this band.

Ah, I thought so. Not many of you do, and I didn’t either, until I read the lineup for the third annual Element Music Festival. Lotus, a five-piece from Indiana, is headlining the event; with 13 albums under its belt, it’s a big deal in the United States, but the group clearly hasn’t made a great amount of headway in Canada. Perhaps that’s because it’s a jam band, a representative of an almost uniquely American genre that fuses improvisational rock, smooth jazz, Americana-style story songs, and—in the case of Lotus, at least—house-inspired electronica. The style is presided over by the ghosts of the Grateful Dead and the Allman Brothers, whose torch, more recently, has been picked up by Phish and Gov’t Mule—big enough acts north of the border, but not coliseum-fillers the way they are down south.

So if you’re running a music festival in an out-of-the-way location like Snug Lake, B.C., you’ve got to have something going on beyond headliners that a good chunk of your target demographic hasn’t heard of, right?

Justin Picard, one of the founding partners in the Element Music Festival and its publicist, says that’s exactly the case. The Element crew is selling an experience as well as a concert weekend, he explains, betting that a crowd of approximately 2,000 people in a beautiful setting will allow for a better holiday than the sweltering, urban confines of other multiday events.

“The experience is Snug Lake itself, and the beauty of this amphitheatre, the swimming, the mountain-biking trails,” Picard says, checking in by cellphone from festival headquarters, between Princeton and Merritt. “We’ve got a cool family vibe going on, and a kids’ zone that’s run by this troupe called Big Fun Circus. As well, we’ve got horses roaming the site. So in addition to the music itself, which we are absolutely in love with, it’s the overall experience of being here that we’re also selling.”

Wait: you can swim on-site?

“It’s amazing,” Picard says. “The lake is already warm.”

That might be enough inducement for some coastal denizens to head inland. Others will want to peruse the full festival lineup before making a decision, although only committed jam-band fans will recognize many of the names. Probably the best-known act is Karl Denson’s Tiny Universe, arguably the most deeply funky group on the jam-band scene and a frequent visitor to Vancouver in the past. (Saxophonist Denson is about to get a lot more mainstream recognition, Picard points out; he’s just signed on as a touring member of the Rolling Stones.)

Element’s bookers are especially excited about Spafford, a band whose mix of well-chosen covers, spacious originals, and freeform improv is very much in the Grateful Dead vein. “These guys are out there hustling, and musically they’re trying to push the limit,” Picard says. “There’s some challenging stuff that they’ll be outputting.” He also cites Narayan Padmanabha, who’ll accompany yoga sessions with his sitar and electronics, and hails an Element innovation: roving “artists at large”, including horn players Jen Hartswick and Natalie Cressman, from Phish guitarist Trey Anastasio’s band, and Jason Hann, who plays percussion with jam-band superstars and 2017 Element headliners the String Cheese Incident. Their job will be to make spontaneous appearances with the other artists, bringing a real “jam” element to the music.

Unpredictability is part of the jam-band idiom’s charm. “When you’re caught in the middle of a Lotus set and things are getting really weird and you’re like, ‘Where is this going?’ and then they drop back into some groove that becomes comfortable… That feeling, to me, is just very special,” Picard says. “I look for that.”

More predictable—for Picard, at any rate—is that those who make it out to Snug Lake once will return for more. “We understand it’s a saturated festival season,” he says. “We understand that you have to make choices about where you’re going to spend your money. But as a fan of this music for a couple of decades now, I have not experienced anything else like this—and if you don’t give it a shot, you don’t even know what you’re missing.”

The Element Music Festival takes place at the Snug Lake Amphitheatre from next Thursday (July 26) to July 29.