Ann Arbor is well represented in season 10 of The Voice, NBC’s popular singing contest, with competitors Laith Al-Saadi, Daniel Passino, and Jonathan Bach all currently calling the city home.
“It’s pretty awesome that Ann Arbor right now has three people out of forty-eight from, I believe, close to 47,000 people who started out auditioning,” says Al-Saadi, a longtime fixture on the Ann Arbor music scene. The three also share U-M connections: Al-Saadi got his degree in guitar here, while Passino and Bach are both undergrads in the music school.
The forty-eight contestants are divided among the show’s four celebrity coaches, and the Ann Arborites seem to have found good matches: pop singers Passino and Bach on Christina Aguilera’s and Pharrell Williams’ teams, respectively, and Al-Saadi latching on with rock singer Adam Levine of Maroon 5 (who called his blind audition “unbelievable”). The coaches will whittle down the field before the audience chooses the winner in May.
Passino is one of only a couple contestants to qualify all the way from the open-call auditions–Al-Saadi and Bach were sought out by the show’s talent scouts and given more advanced auditions. Passino’s decision to try out was a risk, as he skipped an Italian exam to do so, but, like Al-Saadi and Bach, he’s thrilled to have gotten this far–and is hopeful the show’s exposure will make the sacrifice worthwhile.
