Ledisi
Ledisi, a Grammy-winning vocalist, has wowed fans with her unparalleled vocals for over twenty years. Ledisi is also a songwriter, author, actress, music producer, film producer, publisher, educator, and record company executive.
Growing up, Ledisi was heavily influenced by many soulful music icons, but especially Dr. Nina Simone. Ledisi, in 2021, released her dream project on her label entitled, “Ledisi Sings Nina” with the Metropole Orkest conducted by Jules Buckley and The New Orleans Jazz Orchestra conducted by Adonis Rose. This tour de force jazz project garnered Ledisi her 14th Grammy nomination and received rave reviews, prompting John Legend to say, “In terms of her range, dexterity, clarity, and versatility, she can do anything she wants. She’s one of the great singers in the world, period.”
In addition to a Grammy win and nominations, Ledisi has garnered three Soul Train Music Awards, 19 NAACP Image Award Nominations, an NAACP Theatre Award, and an NAACP nomination for Breakthrough Performance in a Film for her role as Mahalia Jackson in Remember Me. Ledisi also received two LA Alliance Ovation Award Nominations, one for Best Featured Actress in a Musical.
Wyclef Jean
The music that Wyclef Jean has written, performed, and produced — both as a solo superstar and as founder and guiding member of the Fugees — has been a consistently powerful, pop cultural force for over two decades. In 1996, the Fugees released their monumental album The Score, which inspired notoriously prickly rock critic Robert Christgau to write: "so beautiful and funny, its courage could make you weep.” The album, created in Wyclef’s studio in his uncle’s basement in New Jersey, hit No. 1 on the Billboard chart, spawned a trio of smash singles (including their indelible reinvention of Roberta Flack’s 1973 ballad “Killing Me Softly”), and is now certified six times platinum. But Wyclef, a child prodigy with a wealth of musical influences from jazz to classic rock to reggae, resisted the pressure to duplicate the sound and style of that masterwork. Instead, he launched himself as a producer and solo artist whose work drew from an innovative and eclectic palette that included elements of pop, country, folk, disco, Latin, and electronic music.
