Lauryn Hill performs at Toronto's Massey Hall on Dec. 16.Jag Gundu/Supplied
Ready or not, here she comes.
Because Lauryn Hill is typically tardy, the fans at Toronto’s Massey Hall on Tuesday were barely in their seats when the R&B legend arrived onstage only 36 minutes after the appointed showtime. For the diva, a half-hour late is not late at all.
Fashionably late or not, Hill was certainly fashionable: wearing sunglasses at night, a long coat resting on her shoulders, and a giant white, fluffy hat that could hold at least seven rabbits.
And didn’t she pull a rabbit out.
Three-quarters into an ebullient performance that began with an intro vamp and the stately, rhythmically stuttering 1998 anthem Everything is Everything (“I wrote these words, for everyone who struggles in their youth”), Hill’s onstage hype man announced there would be an intermission.
Jag Gundu/Supplied
He was overruled. “We will not stop the momentum of the show,” Hill said. Then she introduced a “friend,” like it was nothing. It was Wyclef Jean, the Haitian rapper/singer/guitarist and bandmate with Hill in the 1990s hip-hop trio the Fugees. He wore a black cowboy hat as he joined Hill and her stage full of musicians, singers and two aerobically up-to-it dancers for the Fugees’ 1994 rap Vocab, which rhymes with “the gift of gab.”
The partial Fugees reunion was on. Everything was everything.
The concert was the penultimate stop on Hill’s Artist in Residence tour across Canada. On Monday, she shot a concert video at Toronto’s 600-capacity Mod Club. The 50-year-old icon is set to perform two concerts at Ottawa’s National Arts Centre on Friday.
She retired side stage as Jean took the spotlight on a cover of Bob Marley’s No Woman, No Cry and more. Though Jean has collaborated with Carlos Santana in the past, his guitar solo at Massey Hall checked off most all the stunts in the Jimi Hendrix playbook: the guitar behind the neck, using teeth to pick notes, playing bent back while on his knees − excuse him while he kisses the sky.
Hill came back for a high-energy run of Fugee favourites Killing Me Softly with His Song, Ready or Not and the finale, Fu-Gee-La.
Missing was Fugee rapper Pras Michel, who last month was sentenced to 14 years in prison for using money to peddle influence in U.S. federal politics. The trio’s 2024 reunion tour was quietly cancelled with no explanation, and now one of the Fugees is a felon.
The spiritedness at Massey Hall was interrupted, for lack of a better word, by the lacklustre mid-show appearance of “singer” Zion Marley, son of Lauryn Hill and Bob Marley scion Rohan Marley. This was nepotism in semi-action.
Hill resuscitated things with charismatic versions of the Frankie Valli hit Can’t Take My Eyes Off You and Doo Wop (That Thing). Both are cuts from the rapper-singer’s 1998 debut solo album and conceptual masterpiece, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill.
Besides the appearance of Jean, the other bonus of the night was that the concert finished before midnight. As mentioned, Hill has an idiosyncratic sense of time. But does she arrive late, or are her fans just showing up early? It’s a matter of perspective.