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Keys released her debut album with J Records, having had previous record deals first with Columbia and then Arista Records. She later attended Columbia University before dropping out to pursue her music career.
#ALICIA KEYS DIARY MTV UNPLUGGED PROFESSIONAL#
She attended Professional Performing Arts School and graduated at 16 as valedictorian.
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At age seven, Keys began to play classical music on the piano. She was raised by a single mother in the Hell's Kitchen area of Manhattan in New York City. Instruments Vocals, piano, keyboards, cello, synthesizer, vocoder, guitar, bass guitarĪlicia Augello Cook (born January 25, 1981), better known by her stage name Alicia Keys, is an American recording artist, musician and actress. Occupations Singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, composer, arranger, record producer, actress, music video director, author, poet While that doesn't make for a bad listen - she has genuine talent as a singer and her band is sleek and skilled, so they can sell this supple, seductive sound quite well - it doesn't make for a particularly compelling one, either.Origin New York City, New York, United States Over these rhythmic vamps, Keys does have some impressive vocal runs where she departs from the original melody and glides by on the sheer sound of her voice, but when the songs are reduced to the their bare essence, her vocalizing doesn't become a way of telling a story, it becomes the reason she's playing music in the first place. With the exception of her duet with Maroon 5's Adam Levine on the Rolling Stones' "Wild Horses" - duets, by their very nature, necessitate that they be performed as complete songs - that's true of nearly every cut here, whether they're originals or covers the songs are stripped down to their hooks and grooves. Since she sounds good and the band sounds good, this works pretty well on a sheer sonic level - it's good late-night mood music - but there's no sense of storytelling or momentum to her performances: she starts the song in one place and stays there riding in circles until the end. Nowhere is this more evident than her version here of Prince's "How Come U Don't Call Me Anymore" (which she straightens out and truncates to "How Come You Don't Call Me") where she speeds along to the bridge after singing the first verse, then just dispenses with the song altogether, spending the rest of the time vamping, occasionally going back to the bridge. This, more than either Songs in A Minor or The Diary, illustrates why Alicia Keys fits into the post-hip-hop soul world: she places groove and feel above the song. But that's not the only way Unplugged differs from Keys' other two albums.
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Certainly, Keys and her 16 supporting musicians are professionals and they deliver tight, polished grooves, giving her plenty of space to improv and vamp, which is in contrast to her controlled studio albums.
#ALICIA KEYS DIARY MTV UNPLUGGED FULL#
Unlike the early installments of the MTV series, which focused on a performer accompanied only with an acoustic guitar, resulting in unsurprisingly simple affairs, Alicia Keys' Unplugged is big, splashy, and immodest - even if her guitarist is playing acoustic and she plays a piano, not a synth, the extra vocalists, horn section, strings, and full rhythm section complete with electric bass makes this anything but "unplugged." But that doesn't really matter, since this is presented and marketed as a live album more than an acoustic record, and, as a live album, it's OK. Forget that it's awfully hard to call this live recording Unplugged.