“We’re about to see an extravaganza of a lifetime!” the announcer shouted from the stage. All eyes in the room suddenly looked up to the ceiling, where a bundle of white twigs had been tied together with Christmas lights to resemble a massive flying horse that seemed like it might swoop down and breathe fire on the curtains. But the announcer just meant that Alicia Keys was about to come on and play a few nice tunes.Granted, it’s probably been some time since the soul sensation headlined a venue as small as Ruby Skye. Last time she was in the Bay Area, it was for a pair of sold-out shows at the Paramount Theatre in Oakland. Four days earlier it was Madison Square Garden, topping a bill that featured Fall Out Boy, Avril Lavigne and the Jonas Brothers. But on Monday, Keys crammed her Vegas-sized revue into the intimate Union Square nightclub to help radio station 106.1 KMEL-FM usher in the holiday season and spread the buzz around her new No. 1 album, “As I Am.”

Flanked by a full live band and a pair of gigantic, oddly shaped trees, the Grammy-winning songwriter bound out waving her arms and twirling her hair in time with the slap-bass-heavy soundtrack. The well-lubricated audience seemed to appreciate the gesture, especially the part where she stopped the music and announced, “The whole Bay Area is one of my favorite places in the world!”

Taking her place behind a stand-up keyboard, the classically trained pianist dipped into her back catalog with an eloquent reading of “A Woman’s Worth,” reminding the crowd why they keep giving her Grammys and Bob Dylan felt it necessary to send her a shout-out on his most recent album.

All slow-motion soul with just a touch of drama, the song had everyone singing along until Keys abruptly decided to smush it into a medley that included a big chunk of “Unbreakable,” an oddity from her “MTV Unplugged” album, that somehow worked its way into “Teenage Love Affair,” a song from the latest release in which she mainlines the Jackson Five with just about all the required maturity: “Hey boy/ You know I really like being with you/ Just hanging out is fine/ So maybe we can go to first base.”

Keys’ new album is not her best. Although a respectable offering by anyone else’s standards, “As I Am” lacks the dazzling sophistication of 2001’s debut “Songs in A Minor” and convincing retro textures of 2003’s “The Diary of Alicia Keys.” The methodical piano ballads make the smoky-voiced singer sound about a hundred years older than she really is, while her many attempts at making her music more accessible to Target shoppers seem somehow misguided. Having John Mayer play on your record is never going to solve anything.

“When I was working on this album there were a lot of things going on,” Keys explained, before kind of losing the thread. Anyway, pop songwriter-for-hire Linda Perry (she who wrote Christina Aguilera’s “Beautiful” and Pink’s “Get the Party Started”) was roped in to contribute the track “Superwoman,” which is merely a low point on the album but caused people to actually back away from the stage cringing by the time Keys got to the words, “I am a superwoman, even when I’m a mess, I still put on a vest with an ‘S’ on my chest, oh yes.”

Fortunately, things turned around quickly with the one-two punch of cascading funk classics, “You Don’t Know My Name” and “If I Ain’t Got You,” songs in which Keys effectively conjures up visions of a skinny Aretha Franklin devouring the Burt Bacharach songbook. For just a few minutes, everyone stopped barking drink orders and blabbering on about their latest mix tapes and actually let the hairs on the back of their necks stretch out.

Keys closed out her hourlong set with an incredibly rousing version of her new single, “No One,” that saw her running back and forth across the stage and possibly maybe even kind of dancing. By the song’s cacophonous end, you had to wonder: How did she hold back all that energy all night? More importantly, why?

And then Alicia Keys did something really mean. She bowed and slipped away without playing a single note of “Fallin’,” only her biggest, most emotionally racked hit ever. What a Scrooge.

Just to make things clear: I did NOT write the article. The article was written by Aidin Vaziri at http://www.sfgate.com.