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Freshman Jazz Major Wé McDonald Gives Show-stopping Performance on Finals of NBC’s The Voice

William Paterson freshman jazz major We’ McDonald placed third in season 11 of NBC’s The Voice.

During the show's final competition on December 12, the 17-year-old joined her Voice coach Alicia Keys for a duo performance of Ave Maria, and sang an original single, Wishes, written for her by Alicia Keys’ frequent collaborator, Harold Lilly.  She closed out the night with a show-stopping performance of Barbra Streisand’s rendition of Don’t Rain on My Parade.

The campus followed her journey with great excitement. “She has a rare combination of world-class talent and total humility,” David Demsey, professor of music and coordinator of jazz studies, told The Record.  “The amazing thing is what we see on TV is really her. And that’s very, very rare that you meet somebody, at any age, that’s the same person in a school corridor and in front of a national TV audience. It’s going to carry her far.”

McDonald tried out for the show prior to arriving on campus for the fall semester. Her blind audition for the show—a powerful version of the Nina Simone classic “Feelin’ Good”—catapulted her to the attention of the American public when it aired during a preview episode of the show following the closing ceremonies for the 2016 Summer Olympics.

Keys, a Grammy Award-winning singer-songwriter and one of the four coaches on this season of The Voice, was moved by McDonald’s performance. "I look at you, you're so beautiful and you're so perfectly yourself," Keys told her. "I feel so much inside of you, and that's what we need in music."

McDonald, who selected Keys as her coach on the show, told entertainment writer Vicki Hyman of nj.com that Keys has advised her to be true to herself.  "There's of course little technical things, but it's really not as important as the main message of her saying, 'You have to continue to be yourself. Dress how you dress. Act how you act. Be you and it's okay, and if people don't like you, that's their problem."

A resident of Paterson, she is a graduate of Passaic County Technical Institute in Wayne, where she was active in the performing arts theater program; McDonald has also studied dance, vocal music and theater at the Harlem School of the Arts.  She has performed several times at Harlem’s famed Apollo Theater, where she has won Amateur Night four times.