Facing an overflow crowd of 15,000 at Wingate Park in Brooklyn on Monday night, Lauryn Hill said: “Let’s see how many people remember me. I know I haven’t been around for a while.”
Lauryn Hill sang to an overflow crowd on Monday night.
Ms. Hill has been one of R&B’s most notorious absentees. Her last studio album, “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill,” was released in 1998 and won five Grammy Awards. But it was followed only by an “MTV Unplugged” session recorded in 2001 that was as much talk as music, and recently by a rock song, “Lose Myself,” for the soundtrack of the movie “Surf’s Up.” (That was her only new song in the set.) Ms. Hill has been in and out of a reunion with the Fugees, the hip-hop group that started her career, and she has been showing up late for concerts on her current tour.
She was about 45 minutes late in Brooklyn. After an amateurish opening set by the 17-year-old singer Sean Kingston, the audience was told that Ms. Hill was still on her way to the park. And it didn’t seem promising when her set started with a 10-minute overture by her versatile band. But then Ms. Hill — in a reddish Afro and a fringed jacket that made her look like a member of Sly and the Family Stone — arrived onstage for more than two hours of music that was driven, soulful and fiery.
Rapping fluently at top speed and singing more forcefully than she did in the 1990s, Ms. Hill tore into songs from “Miseducation” and the Fugees, often segueing them into righteous Bob Marley songs. (Ms. Hill has children with Marley’s son Rohan.) Her rhymes are often about her capabilities, her confidence and what she expects from the world, while her songs admit to heartache and vulnerability, determined to draw lessons from them.
She and her big band — which included two trap drummers, a horn section and backup singers — had thoroughly revamped the music. They replaced the boom-bap of her ’90s hip-hop with music from across an African diaspora: funk, jazz, reggae, ska and other Afro-Caribbean beats.
Although her voice had a hoarse, raspy edge, possibly from the strain of touring, she did not spare herself. She used the rasp for emphasis like a classic soul singer or a preacher, as one more way to telegraph emotion. Often Ms. Hill seized a line of a song as an incantation: repeating it, rephrasing it, pushing it lower and higher, switching from ache to defiance or leaping away to scat-sing a barrage of syllables. She was fervent and insistent, but she also eased off to croon two ballads associated with Roberta Flack — “Killing Me Softly With His Song” (her hit with the Fugees) and “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” — and a Shirelles-style version of “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?”
In many of the songs Ms. Hill inserted lines, sung and declaimed, about refusing to compromise. She has spoken in interviews about her distaste for the music business and its marketing niches. But she is a hugely gifted musician with larger social ideals, and the kind of performance she gave on Monday night needed no compromises at all.
