If you want to catch the real soul of the Caribbean, you have to stop and listen to the music. Henry Shukman gets down with zouk, salsa, reggae, and calypso and goes on a magical musical tour of the islands

Jah Cure is a new reggae musician playing up a storm in Jamaica today. He is only twenty-four but has no need of a multinational company to hype up a hit: He has been recording right in his cell using a portable studio, and you can hear his songs all over the island.

"Hear this," he says into the phone. A light, raspy strumming begins on a guitar, in minor chords, and a plangent tenor voice riffles through a haunting melody as he plays his new hit. If only I were a talent scout. The best music in the Caribbean has always been rebel music. (Danga Zone, the label that has just signed Jah Cure, has another artist named Felony.) Caribbean music has outlaw in its genes—not just the DNA of Jimmy Cliff in the cult movie The Harder They Come; of Bob Marley; of Willie Colón, the arch salsa villain playing his trombone as if firing a gun. Long before any of them, it was the Maroons, the runaway slaves in their mountain redoubts, who would beat their drums and dance all night long and then sweep down to wreak havoc on the plantations.

When the music promoter I'm with offered to call Jah Cure for me, I was surprised to learn that he was allowed a cell phone in jail. "The guards cut these musicians some slack," he said. "Even in jail they're still stars, you know."

It was not as an outlaw but as a truant that I got into Caribbean music back in the late 1980s. When I should have been at Cambridge studying, I took my trombone into the calypso scene of West London. Golden Cockerel, Mighty Tiger, and the other local singers, most of them bus drivers, would shed their uniforms and don outrageous costumes by night, to strut across the stage during the weeks before the Notting Hill Carnival. From there, my trombone took me to Trinidad, courtesy of a man named Len Homer (of the band Homer's Odyssey), who reckoned a white trombonist might have novelty value in Port of Spain. Next thing I knew, I was strapped onto a flatbed truck in the midst of the Blue Ventures soca band, to spend forty-eight hours trundling slowly and very noisily around the streets of Trinidad's capital city, blowing my horn as hard as I could. My lips went numb, and the drip feed of rum didn't so much get me drunk as transport me to another realm, one where there was no fatigue or frustration: It was my first glimpse of the Land of Carnival. The rhythm, the dancing, the near-naked humanity, the glee and gregariousness of it all—this, I thought afterward, as I staggered across the park at the center of the city, which was strewn like a battlefield with the bodies of exhausted couples—this was what music was for.