DIA FRAMPTON BURNS THE NET WAVES WITH THE PIANO

Posted on Jun 17, 2011 in News & Events, Piano Blog | 0 comments

Did you catch Dia Frampton on NBC’s vocal competition show, “The Voice”? If not, you missed something special. You can still see a recording of her live performance online (Look under the Quarter Finals, Round 1 link on the right side of the page). To just hear the purity of her voice without the distraction of video, check her out on YouTube!

“The Voice” is NBC’s answer to “American Idol” with Carson Daly bringing a little cool-while-slightly-geeky-but-not-cheesy vibe as NBC’s emcee version of Ryan Seacrest. “The Voice” claims that it only focuses on the singer’s voice, and here’s how it did this in the first rounds:

• Auditions happened ahead of time.
• The show started with those who had made it through auditions singing “blind” for 4 mentors. How? The 4 superstar mentors sat in chairs faced AWAY from the singer. As they listened to the singer, if they liked what they heard, they pressed a button which rotated the chair and the mentor to face the singer with a lit-up sign saying, “I want you”. If more than one mentor turned their chair around, the singer got to choose who they wanted to work with.
• Each mentor selected 8 singers. The following week, they paired their 8 up with each other to sing a duet-duel of the mentor’s choice. At the end of the duet, the mentor had to choose the winner. This whittled each of the mentors’ teams down to 4.
• At this point, the singers started singing live and America started to vote. America’s vote identifies one singer who is “safe”. Then the mentor has to choose 1 other singer who is safe and moves onto the next round along with America’s choice, while sending 2 others home.
• Just as an FYI, the 4 mentors are Country Music Association Male Vocalist of the Year, Blake Shelton; hip hop and soul icon, Cee Lo Green; pop megastar, Christina Aguilera and Maroon 5 front man, Adam Levine.

Quiet Dia Frampton started surprising people right off the bat when she chose Blake Shelton as her mentor since she has sort of a Jewel-folk vibe going on.

So what made Dia’s performance last week so special? Many things, but it was the piano that made all the difference! Let’s consider the other major reason before we turn to the significance of the piano:

23-year-old half-Korean, half-Dutch Dia is not the snappiest dresser on the show. She has so far shown up in extremely conservative clothes that don’t really reflect her youthful, fresh spirit. So imagine the surprise when she chose to sing Kanye West’s “Heartless” for her first live performance. While Dia is quite pretty, she is self-admittedly shy, and she hadn’t really stood out prior to her first live performance. Because of this, it seemed like she might be headed home pretty early because she just seemed to lack the chops and presence of some of the other impressive singers on the program like Beverly McClellan, Vicci Martinez and Nakia.

To help her break through her shy demeanor, her mentor Blake asked her if she could play “Heartless” on the piano. She said she could, and he explained that he thought that would give her a distraction and a comfort zone to help her come out of her shell more so she could connect with the audience.

Well, did she ever. She sat at that piano in an innocent white dress with a big black bow and did a rendition of “Heartless” that Cee Lo said was better than Kanye’s original version. And the downloads of the piece off iTunes pretty much told the story before results show that Dia would be voted one of America’s favorites.

In a brilliant move, Dia took her hands off the piano for a stretch of the song and simply sang a capella, letting her incredible and moving voice ring out and rock the house.

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