After three decades, Wyclef Jean is finally ready to tell his own story

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Backstage at the Blue Note jazz club, Wyclef Jean spreads out on a couch with the air of a sunned cat, his temperament dialed warm.His rider contains only healthful snacks: granola bars, melon slices, grapes large as ping-pong balls.

The smell of weed seeps through the doors.Does he still smoke? “Do fish swim?” he responds.Jean has two personalities, he attests: “the peaceful one here, and the bonkers one onstage.” Right now, the rascal in him slumbers, briefly glimpsed now and again behind dark shades.

We are here just days after the death of John Forté, a close friend and collaborator whose role in shaping the Fugees’ platinum-selling sound has long been under-credited.“We would talk all the time,” he says.His last text to Forté reads: “Yo, text me, so I know you okay?” There was no reply.

“He had this smile that shook the universe.”Lately, memory has become Jean’s greatest inspiration.It’s the second night of his five-night residency at Blue Note Los Angeles, in which he performs a carnivalesque staging of his life and career, leaping from Haitian rara to boom-bap, from reggae-inflected balladry to rock guitar theatrics.

At one point, he performs cunnilingus on his guitar.Like his forthcoming seven-part project, “Quantum Leap,” the show is a walk-back to his genesis.Over the last three decades, Jean has become a key figure in modern pop music.

He is one of its greatest cultural coalitionists, fusing Pan-American sounds — hip-hop, Jamaican reggae, Haitian kompa, gospel, salsa, folk — into music that is party-ready and politically alert.He prefigured today’s globalized music economy long before it had language for itself, though his influence has often been oddly glossed over.As a solo artist, he’s put out nine albums that have sold upward of 9 million copies worldwide, from his 1997 debut “The Carnival” to 2000’s aptly named �...