Lauryn Hill for Capetown International Festival

Lauryn Hill

The reclusive multiple Grammy Award-winning Lauryn Hill has added the Cape Town International Jazz Festival to her comeback run. For as much as the organisers espAfrika are forking out her performance fees (she comes at a higher price than initial headliner Jill Scott), it is Hill who needs the audience more.

Rashid Lombard, espAfrika's CEO, revealed yesterday that four women - Erykah Badu, Angie Stone, India Arie and then Scott - were on the initial list of preferred performers.But just when it looked as if Scott, who had already been announced to much fanfare, was the frontrunner, she suddenly cancelled because of a conflict with her filming schedule.

Lombard considered a lawsuit against Scott but a compromise was reached with the US singer promising to work with the same organisers on a possible national tour later this year. Lombard said yesterday: "We were already sold out by the time she cancelled, and we had to give the audience someone in the same genre and vein [as Scott], so that there was no reason for people to ask for refunds: that's how we came up with Lauryn Hill."

Organisers had been trying to lure Scott to the festival for the past eight years with no luck, he says. Since confirming, Hill has asked that she be referred to as "Ms Lauryn Hill", asked for a longer set and will arrive in the country a day before "just to rest and see the city". Lombard said Hill's tour rider wasn't too startling, with requests for snacks, imported water and juice, and no alcohol.

But since the release of her lustrous debut offering The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill in 1998 - which won her six Grammys - it's been scandals non-stop. A year after picking up those Grammys (she also won an additional two with The Fugees), she went on a three-year hiatus, complaining about the "system" either trying to change her or for not protecting her.

After a failed comeback with The Fugees in 2004, Hill disappeared again. In disappearing, she dropped out of a lead movie role and forgot all about a romantic comedy she was mooted to be writing. People magazine reported in 2008 that Hill had been hours late for a gig and was booed off the stage.

There were also reports that Rohan Marley - the father of her three sons and two daughters and son of legendary reggae singer Bob Marley - had abandoned her, forcing her to release a statement on her website.

In it, Hill denied all the reports, saying that, despite "long periods of separation over the years", their children were their "joy".

However, there are signs of a concerted efforts of a comeback, even if her voice is shot. In various performances, including at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in California, the New Orleans Jazz Fest and a medley at an Aretha Franklin tribute at the end of last year, Hill was reduced to raspy scat singing - but her performance didn't lack energy.

In videos of a gig in Stockholm, Sweden, in January, a healthy-looking Hill before performing Lost Ones told the crowd: "Through all those years, all the things that people said, they had no idea what was going on behind the scenes. "But understand that my intention was always to come back and give a better version of the story. A more truthful, more honest story."

She performed a new song called Fearless Vampire Killer in the Stockholm gig. The 13th edition of the Cape Town International Jazz Festival, starting next Friday, will feature Zamajobe, Dave Koz, James Ingram, HHP and Marcus Miller, among others.