PREFACE

For those of us who live in northern climes, where the winters are long, dark, and bone-gnawingly cold, the first brush of tropical air that caresses us we when step out of the plane in Jamaica is nothing short of bliss.

Before our first visit to Jamaica in 2001, I read (and re-read) on the negril.com site about all the places to stay in Negril, and gleaned valuable bits of information from the message board.

In the end, I chose for our twelve days two small places—one on the cliffs and one on the beach—both, as it turned out, to our liking. And after our four nights on the cliffs and eight days on the beach, we understood why the Jamaica fans who post on the negril.com board (and other boards) count the "sleeps" till their next visit.

The title of this collection was inspired by our first nights on the Negril cliffs where, in our cottage by the sea, we were bewitched by the soothing, sloshing, sometimes dramatically-booming lullaby of the waves rolling in and out of the limestone caves below the cottage. Like a Bach cantata, the sloshing and hollow booming are complex, multi-layered, and ever-changing.

Then, too, the culture of Jamaica, like a Bach cantata, is rich and full of surprises. As all Jamaica fans know, Jamaicans are friendly people with a wonderful sense of humor. They speak "the King's English" in varying degrees of proficiency, and they also all speak their musical patois, with its colorful words and grammatical structure.

And there's the delicious Jamaican food—a sophisticated blend of African, Indian, and native Caribbean cuisines. It is easy to get wonderful food in Jamaica.

Visually, Jamaica is music to the eyes: a colorful, beautiful, varied landscape. Because Jamaicans are surrounded by natural beauty, they have a strong artistic sensibility. It's no wonder that many Jamaicans—and we visitors who love the country—call the island Paradise.

This CD contains 2640 photos of Jamaica taken over four years, from our first visit in 2001 to our most recent in 2004. The photos are not so much fine art as "street" photography—images, impressions, sketches—caught mostly on the run. While they do not begin to give a complete picture, I hope that, as a whole, they give a sense of the island and its people, and will appeal not only to those who already know and love Jamaica, but to those who have yet to make their own happy discovery of the country.

The work on this CD was just about complete when hurricane Ivan struck Jamaica. Some of the places in these photographs were badly damaged, including the enchanting cottage where we spent our first nights and were lulled to sleep by the cantata of the sea in the caves below.