One Night Tour

Wyclef Jean engaged in some swift shuttle diplomacy on Monday night.

The part-time solo artist and member of multi-platinum hip-hop trio the Fugees performed an hourlong set with his band, the Refugee Allstars, for a full house at the Palace--a show that was booked after his House of Blues concert the same night sold out. Then Jean and his crew decamped to the House of Blues to perform that late show.

The double feature afforded the opportunity to see whether Jean would stick to a well-rehearsed game plan for the long haul or mix it up a bit. Turns out he explored both extremes, though not always successfully.

What was perhaps most surprising was that, contrary to traditional rock etiquette, the earlier performance was considerably more ragged and slapdash than the late show, thanks in no small part to Jean’s self-defeating tendencies as a bandleader. All the ingredients were certainly in place for something special: Jean’s backing band features a crack rhythm section, fellow Fugee Prakazrel “Pras” Michel on keyboards and the nimble, charismatic rapper John Forte.

But just when it seemed that the Allstars were getting ready to lock into a groove from Jean’s venturesome 1997 solo album, “The Carnival,” he would abruptly cut them off and launch into either a lame skit or a quick swatch of another song. A tedious, un-funky freestyle session with guest rapper Canibus was particularly deadly. The result was a disjunctive series of anti-climaxes that never reached critical mass.

Which is a shame, because Jean is one of hip-hop’s most prodigious talents: an accomplished songwriter, producer and arranger whose best material has an appealingly spiritual undercurrent.

The few highlights of the Palace show were the most impassioned: a mournful version of Bob Marley’s “No Woman, No Cry”--which was also a top 20 hit for the Fugees in 1996--set off Jean’s yearning vocal and sparse guitar against the band’s bobbing reggae lope. Jean’s poignant composition “Gone Til November” was performed twice: once as a Hendrix-like ballad with the band, the other as a hard-core hip-hop jam. Both worked to perfection but failed to compensate for the choppy, truncated nature of the rest of the set.

Jean jettisoned most of the needless detours and false endings for his House of Blues show. The more intimate venue seemed to energize him, and all the loose ends of the Palace performance snapped into place, with little room left for between-song patter or dead air.

Jean changed up his set a little, tagging on a Santana song as an introduction to “Gone Til November” and even darting to the keyboard at one point to riff on some quasi-Dave Brubeck jazz in 5/4 time. All of which proved that when it comes to pulling double duty in a live situation, Jean works best on the late shift.