Grammy-winning Hip Hop artist Wyclef Jean is coming to Ohio next month for “A Night of Symphonic Hip Hop.”
Jean will be performing Fugees hits like “Killing Me Softly” and solo singles like “Gone till November” with the Dayton Philharmonic on Feb. 8 at Dayton’s Schuster Center, with Neal Gittleman conducting. Tickets for the 8 p.m. concert are on sale now at daytonperformingarts.org.
A promotional email for the A Night of Symphonic Hip Hop with Wyclef Jean event says that Jean and the orchestra will also perform songs that he produced or co-produced, including Santana’s “Maria Maria,” Destiny’s Child’s “No, No, No” and Whitney Houston’s “My Love is Your Love.” Other songs on the setlist include “If I Was President,” “Sweetest Girl,” “No Woman No Cry,” “Borrowed Time” and his Mary J. Blige collaboration “911.”
Jean has been doing his orchestral shows for the past couple of years, including one with the Columbus Symphony in 2018. The 2018 symphonic tour was part of a series from Live Nation Urban and TCG Entertainment; Common and The Roots have also played A Night of Symphonic Hip Hop concerts.
“A fusion of classic and modern, the hip-hop was swept up in the sounds of the orchestra as a tuxedo-clad Wyclef beckoned fans to their feet, led them in song and got them to turn up,” writer Kevin Coffey wrote in his review for the Omaha Review-Herald of Jean’s 2018 concert with the Omaha Symphony.
The ticketing page for the Dayton event says that the Feb. 8 show will open with Dayton “librettist, healer, teaching artist and entrepreneur” Sierra Leone reading her poem “Vision Perfected,” which was commissioned specially for the concert.
This article appears in Jan 22 – Feb 4, 2020.