With Curaçao's Music, You Can Hear the Cultural Mix Meridith Kohut for The New York Times Dancing to live ritmo kombina music in Club Façade in Curaçao. ON one of many late nights in Curaçao, I found myself in a musical tower of Babel. The setting: a sleek iron-and-glass nightclub, Tu Tu Tango, near Willemstad, the Caribbean island's capital. The crowd: well-heeled local men in their 30s, high-heeled ladies in skintight get-ups, Dutch women in sundresses, 20-somethings wearing gold chains and Yankees caps. The soundtrack: a mix of English, Spanish, hip-hop argot, Jamaican patois, Portuguese - or was that Papiamentu, Curaçao's native Creole? Beats evoked Puerto Rico, Holland, Brazil, the Jersey Shore. Just when I felt primed to classify, the rhythm morphed and the language veered off to another continent. "I know what they want," said D.J. Tico, a local radio personality and club D.J. "Merengue, salsa, some R&B and hip-hop. A little house, a little local music, a piece of European music. One or two bachata, maybe some Jamaican dancehall. D.J. Tico smiled at me, the nonplussed tourist. Then you pretty much get everybody. A few hours later - after a short drive past snack trucks besieged by crowds wolfing down chicken doused in peanut sauce - I landed at Club Façade, where the musical muddle intensified. In a vast, basementlike space with peeling walls, speakers blared some variety of techno music: familiar enough. Within minutes, though, a man in his 40s wearing a baby-blue guayabera weaved through the crowd, took the stage with a six-piece band and transformed the scene from fist-pumping to grown-and-sexy. The cadence was slow, the dance intimate - a beguiling groove reminiscent of Haitian zouk. All these tempos, on one small island, in a single night? Never mind a hangover; I had a severe case of aural vertigo. Attribute it to Curaçao - a dazzlingly diverse country 44 miles off the Venezuelan coast, a multicultural mélange of the Netherlands, the Caribbean and South America. As a Dutch colony, Curaçao, 171 square miles of desertlike terrain surrounded by cerulean waters, was a salt producer and slave port; during the 17th century, Jews from Spain and Portugal took up residence there; in the early 1900s an oil refinery lured more foreigners. Today, the island of about 150,000 is home to some 50 nationalities. Most locals speak four languages: Dutch, English, Spanish and Papiamentu, which fuses the first three languages with Portuguese and African dialects. The island is technically a new country, having became autonomous within the Kingdom of the Netherlands just over a year ago. It's also an emerging destination: arrivals shot up 16 percent in early 2011, and new direct routes on Continental, Air Canada and InselAir have made it easier to reach. Gleaming brand-name hotels have opened in recent years - a Renaissance in 2009, a lavish Hyatt in 2010. But Curaçao is not really a chain-hotel kind of place; it lures the traveler who knows that there is history and culture to explore in the Caribbean, one that extends beyond the beaches. That culture is most exuberantly manifested in Curaçao's music scene. The soundtrack of the island is both vividly varied - there are an estimated 30 to 40 radio stations - and distinctly live: more popular than D.J."s are bands playing local music that is, like everything else in Curaçao, utterly hybrid. All music is fundamentally fusion - especially the music of postcolonial cultures - but in Curaçao that hybrid feels particularly alive, as if you can feel the culture Creolizing by the minute. SURE, there is plenty to do on the island: beaches lined with bars and restaurants, top-notch diving, intriguing museums - including the most extensive slave museum in the Caribbean - and a picture-perfect capital city, Willemstad, a Unesco World Heritage site. Punda, Willemstad's historical epicenter, is filled with 17th-century buildings resembling multihued gingerbread cookies. Visitors can stroll the cobblestone interior of Fort Amsterdam, erected in 1635 to defend Peter Stuyvesant's new colony, and the 18th-century Mikvé Israel-Emanuel, the oldest continuously operating synagogue in the Western Hemisphere. BAZ DREISINGER is a journalist and associate professor of English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice who writes about Caribbean culture.