Alicia Keys At Massey Hall in Toronto on Monday
The same music industry that divides the public into a thousand cloistered markets dreams daily of someone who will surmount the formats and unite the people. Lately that someone has been looking like Alicia Keys.
You didn't even need to enter Toronto's Massey Hall to see the proof. On the sidewalk, a highly diverse crowd was desperately trying to score tickets to the sold-out show, from scalpers demanding upwards of $200 for a seat.
Inside, preteen girls sat with their moms, R&B fashion plates set the quotient for cool, and professional couples bobbed their heads discreetly. Keys's soulful kind of pop coaxed them all into the same wide groove.
Keys at 21 is what the industry coldly describes as "the total package." She can write a hit single ( Fallin', which accounted for most of her six recent Grammy nominations), and perform it with style. She moves well and can chat up a crowd with casual dignity. She looks good in a video or from a balcony seat, even when hiding her porcelain-doll features under the brim of a big felt hat.
The total package arrived for her current tour's only Canadian date in an elaborate show-biz wrapper. On a set designed to look like a Hell's Kitchen street, an expert ensemble of 14 musicians and three dancers backed Keys in a tightly produced set of tunes from her album Songs in A Minor, which has sold over four million copies in the past six months.
Her material has changed in the shift from disc to stage, getting bigger and bolder at one end, and more intimate at the other. Her medium-funky, full-band performance of Rock Wit U had much more drive than the languid album version. Prince's How Come You Don't Call Me became a sprawling dramatic songfest that featured solos for two of her backup singers (including the fever-hot Jessica Wilson) and ended when Keys strode to the onstage phone booth and hung up on a former boyfriend. She did Goodbye in a solo cocktail arrangement at a grand piano, which depending on your point of view either confirmed the truth of this melancholic pop number or emphasized its shallowness.
In all moods, Keys was the perfect Goldilocks, neither too hot nor too cold. Like her lyrics, which constantly seek the right balance between independence and vulnerability, her stage presentation sought and found a path between the pink steel niceness of Mariah Carey and the blatant raunchiness of many women in urban music.
A new song called All Night Long had Keys longing to "do it in the kitchen on the table top," and featured some suggestive shadowplay action with a male dancer. But her otherwise demure presentation seemed too deeply rooted to allow any Madonna-like molting of her present image.
Keys studied classical piano for some years, and deploys that training almost the way Liberace used to, as a token of high-class entertainment. Her solo set at the concert grand opened with a keyboard fantasia that started with the first page of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata and ended in the vicinity of George Gershwin.
The star took frequent breaks, though her costume changes involved only a different hat or coat. At one point she left her ensemble in charge of a somewhat strained contest between the live band and the discs cued up on the DJ's turntables, with rapper Freak Nasty romping through the scene like a rodeo clown.
The concert closed with an encore performance of Fallin' for which Keys left aside all her various hats and headscarves and let her cornrows show, to the crowd's loud satisfaction. Like Erykah Badu, she has invested head coverings, or the lack of them, with a symbolism that's all about the tension between femininity and freedom.
Canadian R&B star Glenn Lewis opened the show with a suave and satisfying set that bodes well for an international break-out when his new album appears in March.