The Martin Luther King Jr. Concert Series, celebrating its 25th anniversary season with a line-up of gospel, classic soul, contemporary, Caribbean
and R&B artists really had a BIG SHOW on Monday night.

The notorious no-show, Lauryn Hill stunned the crowd of 15,000 at Wingate Park in Brooklyn with her two-hour set, which included many favorties from the Mis-Education of Lauryn Hill and even two Robert Flack songs. An OTBKB reader had this to say.

Forget the fact that she was scheduled at 7:30 and didn’t come on till a
little after 10, which was expected, but she sounded like she smoked a
pack of camel unfiltered and drank a half a fifth. I saw Lauryn in
1997, pre-Miseducation and she was phenomenal; thats what I expected
last night.

Don’t get me wrong there were flares of genius (her version
of Nina Simone’s Sinnerman, and Zion), but other than that she was all
over, introducing this kind of Afro Jazz Funk that was reminiscent of Phish or the Grateful Dead.

I am still more forgiving then the rest of
the audience who began to leave after the first song. I still love her
for her work on Mis-education and hope she can remain sane enough to
make good music post Rohan [Marley] and being a self-indulgent diva.

But Veteran rock critic, John Parales had a very different impression of the show. He  filed this report with the New York Times:

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.