#Wyclef jean facts windows#

Also featuring Wyclef's cousin Prakazrel Michel (aka Pras) and Michel's high-school classmate Lauryn Hill, the Fugees would go on to blend jazz, rap, R&B and reggae into a multi-platinum career whose second record, The Score, hit number one on the pop and R&B charts in 1996. After buttressing his native musical talents at high school in New Jersey, where he learned guitar and studied jazz, his first group, the Tranzlator Crew, evolved into the Fugees, named for the slang for 'refugee' - a status Jean had emotionally long since left behind but still empathises with. His Grammy wins and nominations are out of proportion for someone barely in his '30s, and his discography is equally extensive. He is also one hell of a musical savant, as well. Haiti till I die!' and has been dubbed by the press as the 'ambassador to the world for hip-hop,' in conversation he will tell you that he is neither a diplomat nor a hyphenated American, but rather 'first and foremost a human being.' However, Jean doesn't think of himself as a Haitian-American, and though he has been quoted as referring to himself as '100 percent Haitian. It fit well with the musical influence conferred by his father, a minister, in whose church Wyclef and his cousin Jerry Wonda - who is still Jean's collaborator on production and composition to this day - would direct (and eventually record) the choir. This sonic palette, in which everything a 100dB sound wave hit would become a resonant instrument itself, probably reminded Jean of his earliest encounter with a musical instrument, the tambu, a conga-like drum he played as a child in the Haitian town of Croix-des-Bouquets.

#Wyclef jean facts windows#

Hip-hop and rap blared from car boots filled with 18-inch subs, rattling auto and apartment windows alike. It was also a place where much of the new wave of Caribbean immigration was settling, where Puerto Ricans had been replaced by Haitians and Dominicans, and its musical and cultural eclecticism fit Jean's inclinations well. Don't be misled by the neighbourhood's fame as a late-19th-century resort area in the 1980s, when Jean was growing up, this area around the last stop on the F train subway was still like Moss Side with a beach. Wyclef Jean is the quintessential American immigrant success story: he moved with family to New York City from Haiti, the buckle of the central Caribbean's notorious island poverty belt, at the age of nine, ending up on another island of sorts - the Marlboro Houses council flats in Brooklyn's Coney Island. Now Wyclef Jean is a star in his own right, and has deployed his production talents for artists ranging from urban legends like Funkmaster Flex and Cypress Hill to Whitney Houston, Michael Jackson and even Tom Jones. In 1996, the Fugees came like a breath of fresh air into a world of hip-hop that was becoming stale around the edges. Wyclef Jean (left) and Jerry Wonda grew up together, and now form an in-demand production and writing team.