Wyclef Jean has signed on as the Chair of the Music Advisory Board for the Harlem Festival of Culture (HFC). In the role, the Fugees member will be in charge of recruiting artists from within the community to support the festival
“I am thrilled to join HFC as Chair of their Music Advisory Board,” Wyclef said in a statement. “On a personal note, Harlem has always held a special place in my heart as I have performed there very early in my career and throughout.”
He continued: “As a creative who is also an entrepreneur, I’m all about creating opportunities for creatives and professionals in our community and when I heard about this reimagining of what was such a seminal milestone in Black creativity and Black music, I knew I wanted to be involved in some way.”
The Harlem Cultural Festival was originally held in the 1960s, but after the release of Questlove’s award-winning documentary, Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised), the event is being rebooted in 2023.
The festival will be held at Harlem’s Marcus Garvey Park, the same site where Stevie Wonder, Nina Simone, and more performed at all those years ago.
“Being rooted, watered, and grown in this village of Harlem, I believe HFC is our moment to show the world the vibrancy of today’s Harlem — the music, the food, the look, all of it! With this initiative, we want to create something that evokes that same sense of pride in our community that I felt on that special day in 1969,” Musa Jackson, one of the festival’s organizers, said earlier this year.
They continued: “We want to authentically encapsulate the full scope: the energy, the music, the culture. We want people to understand that this festival is being built by the people who are from, live and work in this community.”
