Backstage at the Blue Note jazz club, Wyclef Jean spreads out on a couch with the air of a sunned cat, his temperament dialed warm. His rider contains only healthful snacks: granola bars, melon slices, grapes large as ping-pong balls. The smell of weed seeps through the doors. Does he still smoke? "Do fish swim?" he responds.
Jean has two personalities, he attests: "the peaceful one here, and the bonkers one onstage." Right now, the rascal in him slumbers, briefly glimpsed now and again behind dark shades.
We are here just days afterthe death of John Forté, a close friend and collaborator whose role in shaping the Fugees' platinum-selling sound has long been under-credited.
"We would talk all the time," he says. His last text to Forté reads: "Yo, text me, so I know you okay?" There was no reply. "He had this smile that shook the universe."
Lately, memory has become Jean's greatest inspiration. It's the second night of his five-night residency atBlue Note Los Angeles, in which he performs a carnivalesque staging of his life and career, leaping from Haitian rara to boom-bap, from reggae-inflected balladry to rock guitar theatrics. At one point, he performs cunnilingus on his guitar. Like his forthcoming seven-part project, "Quantum Leap," the show is a walk-back to his genesis.
Over the last three decades, Jean has become a key figure in modern pop music. He is one of its greatest cultural coalitionists, fusing Pan-American sounds — hip-hop, Jamaican reggae, Haitian kompa, gospel, salsa, folk — into music that is party-ready and politically alert. He prefigured today's globalized music economy long before it had language for itself, though his influence has often been oddly glossed over.
As a solo artist, he's put out nine albums that have sold upward of 9 million copies worldwide, from his 1997 debut "The Carnival" to 2000's aptly named "The Ecleftic: 2 Sides II a Book," which even transformed wrestling superstar–turned–action hero The Rock into a pop hitmaker with "It Doesn't Matter." Along the way, Jean has consistently championed emerging talent, helping introduce Beyoncé to the world with Destiny's Child's breakthrough single "No, No, No," and co-writing and appearing on Shakira's global smash "Hips Don't Lie." Despite the accolades, Jean still feels misunderstood.
Read more:Teddy Riley is finally getting his flowers. Will he risk it all to work with R. Kelly?
"I still don't feel like the world's figured me out yet," he says. He compares his career, more than once, to Bob Marley's. "Bob Marley don't got one Grammy even though he was the biggest artist in the world."
"Quantum Leap," he hopes, will finally give the world a clearer view of him. The project will consist of seven albums, released over seven months, each devoted to a genre — hip-hop, reggae, jazz, country, Haitian kompa, R&B — and each traceable to a pivotal moment in his career. He's been working on the project for five years, dividing it into seven sections to mirror the 35 years he's spent in music. "You find inspiration in your origin," he says.
Jean was born in Croix-des-Bouquets, Haiti. His first days on Earth were hard. Doctors had to forcibly wrench him from his mother at birth. And as a child living in a country where most live on less than a dollar a day, he was so poor he ate dirt. When he was 9, his family moved to Brooklyn's Marlboro Projects. He spoke Creole at home and learned English at school.
Inspired by Grandmaster Flash, he began freestyling in his early teens, first to himself in the bathroom, then to anyone who would listen in the cafeteria. "All I ever wanted," he says, "was for people to hear me." His minister father loathed rap, yet Jean teasingly and earnestly called himself "the preacher's son," filling his verses with biblical language that still shows up in "Quantum Leap."
Advertisement
At 13, he began conducting the choir at church. His music teacher, Valerie Price, discovered him playing guitar alone in the school auditorium. "Where did you learn this?" she asked. "I can just see it in my head," he replied. "I see numbers. I see one, three, five." She taught him to read sheet music and urged him to learn jazz. "Hell no," he said. "That's for old people. I wanna battle rap." "Why not both?" she countered, a remark Jean now credits with forming his entire philosophy.
After Brooklyn, the family moved to New Jersey, where Jean built a makeshift studio in his uncle's basement. He produced hip-hop tracks, wrote the score for an off-Broadway play attended by Quincy Jones, and came under Jones' tutelage. Around this time, he met Lauryn Hill, with whom Jean would form the Fugees alongside his cousin Pras.
The Fugees wrote and produced one of the most iconic albums in hip-hop history, "The Score," in that same basement studio in New Jersey. Jean still has demos and outtakes from those sessions, but he refuses to release them. "Think of the Beatles, Pink Floyd, Queen," he says. "They've got so many unreleased files, right? I would never want to change the perception of 'The Score.'" There was never any conversation about making a sequel. "Basquiat never duplicated his paintings," he says.
Jean and Hill's relationship, both creative and romantic, had become one of the stormiest in hip-hop. It culminated in a much-publicized fight on an airplane, then decades-long silence.
Was there a moment when he wanted to reach out? "Always," he says. What stopped him? "The universe." I press for specificity. "All the hurt," he says. "We both needed to heal." Now, he tells me, "the vibes are good." He's "Uncle Wyclef" to Hill's children. In recent years, they've reunited onstage: Jean has made numerous surprise appearances on Hill's tours, and they performed their cover of "Killing Me Softly" recently at the Grammys, dedicating it to Roberta Flack during the show's in memoriam segment. "I think this reconciliation between me and Lauryn is one of the best things that could possibly happen to the planet."
He is acutely aware of his powerful influence in all aspects — from "Hips Don't Lie" setting the mainstream template for global genre coalition to all the younger artists who've hailed him in their songs. "When you have kids like Young Thug with songs called 'Wyclef Jean,' and G Herbo sampling '911,' you know, very few of us can connect those bridges," he says.
His influence is felt even more in his home country. Jean has spent much of his career as a roving ambassador for Haiti, becoming a key figure in the jaspora (or diaspora, a term that refers to the scattering of people away from their ancestral homeland in Haiti). In 2010, he ran unsuccessfully for the presidency. "I still got to write the book," he says. "There was no course in poly-sci that could have prepared me for that." He learned, he says, "just how badly Haiti had gotten it within the geopolitical structure."
Read more:How Fab Morvan of Milli Vanilli mounted one of the greatest comebacks in Grammy history
He says, however, that he is not interested in dwelling on President Trump's many racist comments about Haitian immigrants. "I don't get caught up in the politics of what people say because it's all just a big distraction for the bigger issue," he says. "If there's a comment, I make a statement, then I keep it moving." It's an interesting contrast from last year, when he told the Mirror he was keen to take an appointment with the president. Jean doesn't try to explain away the contradiction. He refers to himself as a centrist. "I just ride the middle."
At the Blue Note, Jean performs a kind of Haitian exceptionalism: a sensorially rich, festal theater that serves as a necessary counterweight to the country's grim realities of poverty and political neglect. His large band, squeezed onto a stage scarcely longer than two kayaks laid end to end, is composed almost entirely of Haitian preachers' kids raised in the country's gospel tradition. One musician lifts a Haitian conch. "Go crazy!" Jean demands of the crowd, again and again. And they do as he says.
Yet for all his command, Jean still answers to a higher authority. Recently, Price, Jean's old music teacher, attended one of his shows with a notebook, telling him she'd been grading him at the end of the night. He watched her scribble notes during his performance. "It still put the fear in me," he says, backstage again. He inches up the couch, now smiling, giddy. "She gave me an A."
Get notified when the biggest stories in Hollywood, culture and entertainment go live. Sign up for L.A. Times entertainment alerts.
This story originally appeared inLos Angeles Times.
