After three decades, Wyclef Jean is finally ready to tell his own story

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Relaxing on a couch backstage at the Blue Note jazz club, Wyclef Jean seems completely at ease and content. He’s requested only healthy snacks – granola bars, melon, and large grapes. Despite a faint smell of marijuana in the air, he playfully dodges a direct question about whether he still smokes, responding with a rhetorical, “Do fish swim?”

Jean describes having two sides to his personality: a calm, quiet side and a wild, energetic one he shows when performing. Currently, the energetic side is subdued, only occasionally visible behind his sunglasses.

It’s been only a few days since the passing of John Forté, a dear friend and someone we worked closely with. He was a key part of the Fugees’ hugely successful sound, but his contributions haven’t always received the recognition they deserve.

He remembers they used to talk constantly. His final text message to Forté simply asked, “Yo, text me, so I know you’re okay?” But he never received a response. He fondly recalls Forté having a smile that could light up the whole world.

Recently, Jean has been drawing heavily from his own memories for inspiration. He’s performing a vibrant, theatrical show over five nights at the Blue Note in Los Angeles, where he moves seamlessly between different musical styles – from Haitian rara and hip-hop beats to reggae-influenced songs and energetic rock guitar. The performance is playful and even provocative, including a moment where he playfully interacts with his guitar. Like his upcoming seven-part project, ‘Quantum Leap,’ the show is a journey back to his beginnings.

For the past thirty years, Jean has been a hugely important artist in pop music. He’s a master at blending sounds from across the Americas – including hip-hop, reggae, kompa, gospel, salsa, and folk – creating music that’s both energetic and socially conscious. He anticipated today’s interconnected global music scene long before it was commonly understood, yet his impact hasn’t always been fully recognized.

As a solo artist, he’s released nine albums, selling over 9 million copies globally. His career began with his 1997 debut, “The Carnival,” and continued with successful albums like “The Ecleftic: 2 Sides II a Book” in 2000, which even helped turn Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson into a pop artist with the hit song “It Doesn’t Matter.” Throughout his career, he’s also been a strong supporter of new artists, famously helping launch Destiny’s Child and Beyoncé with the single “No, No, No,” and co-writing and performing on Shakira’s worldwide hit “Hips Don’t Lie.” Despite all his success, he still feels like people don’t fully understand him.

He admits he still feels misunderstood. He points to Bob Marley as an example, noting that despite being hugely popular, Marley never won a Grammy award, drawing a parallel to his own career.

He believes his new project, “Quantum Leap,” will allow people to truly understand him as an artist. It’s an ambitious undertaking: seven albums will be released over seven months, each exploring a different musical genre – including hip-hop, reggae, jazz, and country – and connected to a key point in his 35-year career. He’s been developing this project for five years, structuring it in seven parts to reflect his time in the music industry. As he explains, “Your roots are where you find your inspiration.”

Jean was born in Croix-des-Bouquets, Haiti, and his early life was difficult. He was separated from his mother immediately after birth, and growing up in Haiti, where poverty was widespread, he sometimes had to eat dirt to survive. When he was nine years old, his family immigrated to Brooklyn, New York, moving into the Marlboro Projects. He grew up speaking Creole at home and learned English in school.

Growing up, he started rapping spontaneously around age thirteen, practicing alone at first and then performing for classmates. He says his biggest wish was simply to be heard. Although his father, a minister, disliked rap music, he playfully embraced the nickname “the preacher’s son,” weaving religious themes and language into his lyrics, elements that are still present in his song “Quantum Leap.”

He started leading the church choir when he was thirteen. His music teacher, Valerie Price, found him practicing guitar by himself in the school auditorium and was amazed. When she asked where he’d learned to play, he explained he could hear the music in his head – he visualized it as numbers, like one, three, and five. Valerie taught him to read music and encouraged him to explore jazz, but he resisted, saying it was music for older generations and he preferred battle rap. Valerie challenged him, suggesting he could do both, a suggestion Jean now says shaped his entire approach to music.

Following their time in Brooklyn, the family relocated to New Jersey. There, Jean set up a home recording studio in his uncle’s basement and began creating hip-hop music. He even composed the music for a small off-Broadway production that Quincy Jones happened to see, leading to mentorship from the legendary producer. It was during this period that Jean also met Lauryn Hill, and together with his cousin Pras, they would later form the group known as the Fugees.

Let me tell you, revisiting the making of The Fugees’ The Score is incredible. They crafted that iconic album – seriously, one of the best hip-hop albums ever – in a basement studio in New Jersey. And Laurin Hill still has all these demos and extra tracks from those sessions, but she’s adamant about leaving them untouched. She compares it to legendary artists like The Beatles, Pink Floyd, and Queen – they all have vaults full of unreleased material, and she doesn’t want to risk changing how we remember The Score. A sequel? Never even considered. She puts it beautifully – Basquiat didn’t try to recreate his paintings, and she feels the same way about this album. It’s a perfect, finished statement.

Jean and Hill had a famously turbulent relationship, both as artistic partners and as a couple. It ended with a very public argument on a plane, followed by decades of not speaking to each other.

He says he always wished he could have reached out, but felt held back by everything that had happened between them – both needing time to heal. Now, things are going well; he’s become a sort of uncle figure to Lauryn Hill’s children. They’ve started performing together again, even recently sharing the stage at the Grammys to perform a cover of “Killing Me Softly” as a tribute to Roberta Flack. He believes their reconciliation is a truly positive thing, not just for them, but for the world.

He understands how much impact he’s had on music, from the way his hit “Hips Don’t Lie” helped blend different genres to the many newer artists who’ve referenced him in their own work. He points to examples like Young Thug’s song named after him, and G Herbo sampling one of his tracks, saying, “Not many artists can create that kind of connection across generations.”

Jean’s impact is particularly strong in Haiti, where he’s long been a prominent advocate for his homeland and its people living abroad. He ran for president in 2010, but wasn’t elected. Despite this, he views the experience as valuable, stating that no political science course could have truly prepared him for the realities of Haitian politics. He realized how disadvantaged Haiti had become on the world stage.

He prefers not to focus on President Trump’s past racist remarks about Haitian immigrants. He believes engaging with such comments is a pointless distraction from more important issues. His approach is to address a comment if necessary, then move on. This is a shift from his previous stance last year, when he expressed interest in meeting with the president. Jean acknowledges this change but describes himself as a centrist, someone who avoids extremes and “rides the middle.”

At the Blue Note jazz club, Jean creates a vibrant and celebratory Haitian experience – a joyful performance that offers a powerful contrast to the difficult realities of poverty and political issues back home. His band, though crammed onto a very small stage, is made up mostly of children of Haitian preachers who grew up immersed in gospel music. A musician raises a traditional Haitian conch shell, and Jean repeatedly encourages the audience to let loose and enjoy themselves, which they happily do.

Despite his success, Jean still feels accountable to someone: his former music teacher, Price. She recently came to one of his shows and jokingly told him she was grading his performance, even taking notes while he played. Backstage, he admitted, “It still scared me a little,” but then beamed, explaining, “She gave me an A!”

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2026-02-25 14:33