The star of Sanremo 2026

Alicia Keys charmed the Sanremo audience with a flawless performance, in which, after having to tackle an unlikely duet with Eros Ramazzotti on "L'Aurora", she unleashed her vocal talents at the piano, standing, performing her famous "Empire State Of Mind" (a 2009 hit alongside Jay-Z).

What perhaps not everyone knows, however, is that the New York singer – born Alicia Augello Cook – also shared the stage with David Bowie in what would turn out to be, in effect, his last full concert (the only exception, the following year, being a brief appearance featuring a snippet of "Little Fat Man" during Ricky Gervais's presentation).

On 9 November 2006 the Thin White Duke took the stage at the Hammerstein Ballroom for the Black Ball, the annual charity event supporting Keep A Child Alive, an organisation dedicated to providing life-saving antiretroviral therapy to children and families affected by HIV/AIDS in Africa and other economically disadvantaged regions. A cause Alicia Keys has strongly championed over the years.

Bowie performed just three songs, accompanied on piano by Mike Garson. He opened with "Wild Is The Wind", in a stripped-down piano-and-vocal arrangement. Next came "Fantastic Voyage" with the full band. He closed with "Changes", performed as a duet with Alicia Keys (watch the video below).

It's precisely “Changes,” the historic track from “Hunky Dory”, celebrating constant transformation as a philosophy of life, that takes on a particular symbolic weight. Garson recalled that it was the song he had used to audition for Mick Ronson and David Bowie back in 1972. Finding himself playing it thirty years later, in what would turn out to be the London-born artist's final live performance, closed a precise biographical and professional arc.

According to the pianist, Alicia Keys was originally supposed to play piano herself, but upon seeing him she asked him to handle the accompaniment instead, limiting herself to singing alongside Bowie. The result, in his view, rose to the occasion musically. Garson has repeatedly stressed Bowie's artistic stature: a clearly defined vision, a rare ability to pick the right collaborators and to sense creative developments before anyone else. That clarity, he noted, was already evident in 1972 and hadn't faded even on that final New York evening.

The audience included numerous celebrities, among them Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt. Despite the significance of the event, Bowie didn't want the concert professionally filmed. As a result, only an amateur recording with poor audio quality circulates online. Physically, the English artist still looked like he was recovering. Not much time had passed since the health issues that had forced him to halt live activity in 2004, and according to Garson a certain fragility could be sensed. Yet his professionalism remained intact: command of the stage, interpretive restraint, focus.

November 9, 2006 thus marked, in effect, the quiet close of David Bowie's epic live career — an intimate evening, far removed from the monumental scale of his earlier tours, yet charged with meaning in its very simplicity. By his side was the voice of one of the finest soul singers of her generation.

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03/04/2026