This is an exploration of the region's music - its forms and innovations, musicians, festivals, and dance halls, its fans - and traces its African, Asian and European roots. This book is oriented toward a few distinct yet overlapping sets of readers. One group contains the music lover who has taken a fancy to some kind of Caribbean music and would like to know more about the background of that style and about the region's music as a whole. Another set includes the student of Caribbean society or of pan-American society in general, who seeks an introduction to this most dynamic aspect of the hemisphere's culture.