If you were to look at a satellite map of the Caribbean and imagined the islands were a fossilized skeleton exposed from the ocean over time, the creature's ossified bones would curve as the spine of the Leeward and Windward Islands, but then you would notice one island far out of place — Barbados, a vertebrate not in total alignment with other Carib islands.

Barbados is an anomaly, a cross-mixture of cultures: The British discovered it after the Portugeuse, the Spanish, but theArawaks explored it first, and over the centuries Barbados became a house blend of Africans, Asians, Europeans, and indigenous people from South America and other Caribbean Islands.

Because Barbados has deep roots from many cultures, as do many Caribbean islands, the one fact I always appreciate is the spectrum of music and art on the isles; such was the case at the Barbados Ninth Annual Jazz Festival held January 14-20, 2002, bringing that spectrum full circle with Dionne Warwick and David Sanborn billed as headliners, with a full slate of other talented performers rounding out the venue.

You could not ask for a more lovely festival setting than Farley Hill National Park, which saw two days of exceptional jazz that lasted into the early evening.

In the 1957 James Mason, Joan Fontaine, cult melodrama movie, "Island in the Sun", partially filmed at Farley Hill, St. Peter parish (422-8826), you can see the magnificence of the stately sugar boom era mansion, now in ruins after a fierce fire in the 1960s. The national park preserves many species of indigenous trees, plants, birdlife, and forest animals, such as the agouti, brocket deer, cayman, tortoise, hares, porcupines, and Cuban iguanas amongst the orchids; surely you will spot Barbados green monkeys grooming themselves in the trees.

Farley Hill mansion is set just below the brow of a bluff overlooking virgin mahogany forests and the Atlantic Ocean, with the constant wind blowing as steady as the notes from the jazz festival itself. On one side of the old plantation, sugar cane shines green like the cash crop that it is.

I really fell in love with the people, music, and landscape of Barbados, and hope to return for the gathering of the cane in July and August during "Crop Over."

The famous Cuban ensemble, Orquesta Enrique Jorrin, the creator of the cha cha, played two days after a squall rained them out the first night. And as always, Coleridge and Parry School bands opened each day's session of the season at Farley Hill to the delight, I am sure, of their parents in attendance. The young students get the chance to mingle with world-class professionals, inspiring many to new musical heights.

The festival openers on January 14 were flamenco/rumba-styled Jesse Cook, receiving a standing ovation after

You didn't need a psychic to tell she was adored. She ended her evening with new Bossa Nova lyrics from her new homeland — Brazil.

One of my mid-week venue favorites was The Foursquare Plantation Rum Factory and Heritage Park (US$25 each night), with the seating countersunk into the former rum loading bay (now called the Cane Pit Amphitheatre). The factory was resurrected in the 1990s, and it is now producing a velvety and electrifying smooth rum right on the property. During intermission I toured the rummery and was awed by the silos of cooking sugar cane and the original boilers turning the mash into the Caribbean's best known namesake. During the self-guided tour in the spic and span factory, I sampled the vari

ous stages of the rum, or you can buy liters right from the store.

What better way to enjoy the evening than with island produced rum cocktails and listening to the best of jazz. Performers at Heritage Park included: Freddie Cole (who returns again for the 2003 jazz festival), Samantha Siva from New York, Sonny Amory, former drummer for Earth, Wind and Fire, who performed a drumming ensemble bar none, and Joseph Diamone, also a New York City artisté that was a self aggrandizing promoter — I still get his emails!

Samantha Siva's leaky vocals opened one evening at Heritage, and she must have been slipping in the Arbitron ratings; she was the tonic without the gin, and it was discussed by most patrons that they couldn't wait for her to exit the stage because they were here to see Freddie Cole, the brother to Nat King Cole. Freddie is the gin with no tonic. I am not a big fan of smooth, vocalized, slow jazz. Jazz should be rough around the edges, petulant and pleading, kind of like the blues. That's why I, and everyone else, loved Freddie.

Freddie is someone you can groove with, and I would have loved to meet up with him after hours at the saloon, "Time Out At the Gap," where some performers jammed after their sessions. Unfortunately, Freddie has not released many of his own recordings.

Jazz is the art of invention, and Freddie captured that art like no other performer at the festival. I guess that is why he is asked back this year. Freddie is physically a big man, and his huge fingers exploded like C4, bruising the piano keys, the kinetic energy moving into the audience, rippling under the skin. Freddie's performance was unbroken, uncolored roughness, with the whiff of simplicity and we were kindly conned into his lyrics, urging us not to compare him with his more famous brother. "I am not Nat, I am Fred, I am not my brother. Nat made the money, I am here just to play jazz," he sang, in a sort of delirious, offbeat rant of delightful fantasy, but really a beacon of truth, that blended his majesty with bare knuckle austerity, untainted by the dregs of too much technique, more like sand dune barchans forming and reforming across the landscape of the audience, and each time in a different shape. You could not spell out the form, just the feeling.

Freddie played many of his older brother's sentimental classics, such as