PEOPLE: Alicia Keys's albums have a piano sound which, if not exactly classical, certainly isn't something you normally hear in soul circles, writes Arminta Wallace.
OK, it's pretty simple ..." We all gaze at a board covered with photo-ID badges of various colours and shapes. Each badge bears the head of the soul diva Alicia Keys. It is, however, anything but simple. This is the guest list for her show at the Olympia Theatre tonight. A blue head is good. "You can go pretty much anywhere with that." The stage door man nods. Two stickers is good too. But woe betide the triangles: if you're a triangle, you have to be escorted by someone wearing a badge with at least one sticker. Somebody groans. "It's like a European Championship qualifying table."
I look down at my badge. It's blue. For a moment I feel, absurdly, as if I've won the Lotto. I haven't, of course. What I've won is 15 minutes of the 22-year-old diva's time. But not yet. It's 7.40 p.m. and the gig is due to begin at 8 p.m. That an interview will take place at all seems unlikely - but then, the stage door is itself like a soap opera from a whole other world. People seem to live here. A boy in a Manchester United shirt disappears into the innards of the theatre carrying what looks suspiciously like a kebab and chips. A dusty cupboard is opened, briefly revealing a) a cardboard box containing several pairs of glasses, b) an old brolly and c) one of those samples you get from carpet shops, a foam-backed horror in muffled shades of beige.
A man who isn't sure whether to be incandescent with rage or shaking with laughter is relating a tale of a misunderstanding at another concert venue. "I told them to tell people, point of sale," he says, emphasising the last two words. "Go back to point of sale and you'll get a refund." Instead, a couple of hundred indignant punters turned up at The Point Theatre, demanding their money back from a baffled ticket office. Geddit? But why, we wonder aloud, were they looking for their money back in the first place? A guy with a walkie-talkie grins. The star of the show is, it appears, in custody on the other side of the Atlantic. He pretended to be a federal officer and tried to break into a car at Kennedy Airport or something ..."
Eventually we are sent for. Upstairs in her dressing-room, surrounded by offerings of food which, I note out of the corner of my eye, include a plate piled high with strawberries - soul food? - the diva is composed on a couch like a female deity. It quickly becomes clear that she has been told not to move, for fear of messing up her immaculate yellow bustier, beautifully-pleated dreadlocks and the bits of yellow artwork on her eyelids. Carefully, through clenched teeth, she describes the area of Manhattan where she grew up; the social, ethnic and musical contrasts she accepted as part of life's rich tapestry. When it comes to explaining why a black kid in this particular place at this particular time would study classical piano, though, she forgets herself and smiles.
"There happened to be a woman who lived close by, who taught Suzuki method. I really wanted to play and kept begging my mom, so she agreed we could check her out. She was a wonderful lady who I stayed with for a long time. We began with classical, but then spread to ..." She puts down the mug and spreads her hands wide. "Everything. I played a lot of rag. I played jazz. I started writing my own music. If there was a song on the radio I liked, we'd sit down and take it apart. She'd say, 'Well, what are the chords? Why do you like it?'"
This doesn't sound like any of the piano teachers I know. Keys laughs. "I think a lot of piano teachers turn their students off, because classical music is so disciplinarian, so strict. It follows such a set pattern that sometimes you don't get the opportunity to really express the things that you feel. The classical music that I fell in love with was very dark. Anything minor, I wanted to play it. When it started getting major and happy, I couldn't feel it. I didn't understand it; so it was really, like, Chopin, or when Beethoven would get very dramatic. Satie and Debussy; the beauty and melancholy of it. That was the music that I loved." The classical blues. Listen to Keys's albums and you hear it right away: a piano sound which, if not exactly classical, certainly isn't something you normally hear in soul circles. But it's not something added on as a production gimmick either - or, God help us, an attempt at the dreaded "crossover". It's a product of Keys's diverse musical upbringing.
And it seems to be a winning combination. Her first album, Songs in A Minor, touched a lot of chords, won her a fistful of awards, and sold 10 million copies. Her new album, The Diary of Alicia Keys, is a considerably more polished affair, more in the traditional soul mould. But it still breaks out now and again. The publicity material helpfully supplies a list of musical influences: Beethoven, Mozart and Chopin, Oscar Peterson, Fats Waller and Marian McPartland, Nina Simone, Donny Hathaway, Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder, Tupac Shakur, The Notorious B.I.G., Jay-Z and the Wu-Tang Clan.
Tupac Shakur? Most classical musicians regard The Beatles as a bit radical. Keys shrugs. "Hip-hop was the sound-check to my neighbourhood," she says, with a fond smile. "That's what I heard out of every car, every window, sitting around - so, you know, that's where I got so many mixtures. I think the real thing about hip-hop - when it started, I mean, not now; now it's a monster - but when it started it was about the raw essence. Because so many of us in New York didn't have any exposure to any kind of musicianship, it was about the raw essence of being able to express yourself to a beat. You didn't necessarily have to have trumpets or pianos or guitars in there - it was mainly just a rhythm, and the poetry of what you saw in your life and what you felt. It was real, and raw, and it was really beautiful, there was nothing else like that."
Keys's vocal sound, needless to say, is about as raw as a double mocha in which all the really sweet chocolate has gone to the bottom, and melted. Is there an academy somewhere where soul divas learn to do that? She laughs again. Slowly but surely she's forgetting about the make-up. She tosses a handful of dreadlocks back across her shoulder. At the New York School of Performing Arts, she had a major in chorus work. "It exposed me to other musics and techniques, ways to control your breathing, blending harmonies, that kind of thing. That definitely gave me some kind of foundation but I never had a voice teacher. In some ways it's good because my voice is natural but you can also learn a lot. It's more about protecting your voice, rather than somebody teaching you how to sing." About singing when you don't feel like it? "Uh-huh. And singing 30 years from now, and not going ..." She emits a strangled croak, chuckles, shakes the dreadlocks. Stillness is just not Keys's thing. A head pops around the door. "How're we doin'?" a discreet, but firm, voice asks.
There's just time for the Stevie Wonder story. Isn't there? It's a good story because it illustrates that although Keys has, at 22, scaled the dizzy heights of showbiz stardom, she is still more than capable of being starstruck. It was at a pre-Grammy party last year.
"He was asked to do a finale, so he came up and I had just finished. I was kinda talkin' to the crowd, and he comes up and he's at the piano. And it's like a dream moment for me, you know, because there are certain people - he's one of them, Donny Hathaway's one of them, Miles Davis is one of them - who I always said, I wish I could just watch them play. What do they do? What's their energy? What is it like? So he's warming up and he says, 'So, Alicia - what song do you want me to play?' Now this is another dream moment of mine. In my head I'm like, man. Stevie Wonder, you know? Years ago, when I was listening to his songs, I thought, if he ever asked me what song did I want him to play,I'd want him to play something that's not really well known. I'd show him how much I know his catalogue; how much I really love him. I'd go - you know - deep."
A strange thing has happened to Alicia Keys. She has been transformed from a soul diva who's about to go on stage into a gorgeous, animated, bright teenager with one of those fantastic New York accents and the ability to laugh at herself. "So," she's saying, "he asks me the question. And all this is going through my head, and it's this moment, and there's all these people, and I'm like, 'Oh'. And everything flew out of my head. I couldn't think of a damn song. I couldn't think of anything. All I could think of was, You are the Sunshine of my Life." She groans. "Oh, man ..."
The head reappears and I am ushered out. At the stage door, life is going on as normal. Somebody is tucking into a paper plate of steaming food. What is it, somebody else asks. "I'll tell you now in a minute." He tastes, chews, considers. "Chicken," he pronounces, "in black bean sauce." Soul food. Don't you just love it?