Alicia Keys

Alicia Augello Cook, known professionally as Alicia Keys, born January 25, 1981, in Hell's Kitchen, Manhattan, New York, is one of the most accomplished, multifaceted, and enduring figures in contemporary R&B, a classically trained pianist, singer, songwriter, and record producer of exceptional gifts whose debut album Songs in A Minor (2001) stands as one of the most successful and acclaimed debut albums in the history of R&B. Raised in Hell's Kitchen, the tough Manhattan neighborhood where the Broadway musical West Side Story is set, by her Italian-American mother Terri Augello, who raised Alicia alone after her Jamaican father Craig Cook left the family when Alicia was two, Keys demonstrated exceptional musical intelligence from early childhood, beginning piano lessons at age seven and demonstrating within months a proficiency that prompted her teachers to push her toward classical performance. She attended the Professional Performing Arts School in Manhattan, graduating at sixteen as class valedictorian while concurrently maintaining a scholarship to Columbia University's classical piano program, and signed her first record deal at fourteen after being discovered by A&R executive Jeff Robinson. She signed with Clive Davis's J Records and released Songs in A Minor (2001) at age nineteen, which debuted at number one selling 236,000 copies in its first week — a record for an R&B debut — and produced the iconic singles Fallin' and Piano and I. The album won five Grammy Awards. The Diary of Alicia Keys (2003), Here (2016), and Alicia (2020) continued her artistic evolution, and she has won fifteen Grammy Awards in total. She is also the co-founder of the AIDS awareness charity Keep a Child Alive.