The time 13-year-old Bazzi wowed a Discovery Middle School talent show

On an otherwise normal spring afternoon in 2011, inside Canton’s Discovery Middle School, eighth-grade student Andrew Bazzi, guitar in hand, stepped onto the school’s talent-show stage and gave notice of great things to come.

Singing Bruno Mars’ hit “Talking to the Moon”, the eighth-grader immediately changed the vibe in the room with a beyond-his-years performance that captured the attention of everyone in the room.

“It blew me away, honestly,” remembered Dave Van Wagoner, at the time a teacher at Discovery. “I knew he could sing, I knew he was good … but during that performance, you could see the greatness in his voice and his poise.

“I joked with him in class afterward, saying ‘Once you become famous, remember me’.”

‘The stage is his home’

Jennifer Kwiatkowski, like Van Wagoner a now-retired Discovery educator, remembers Bazzi’s dazzling rendition like it was yesterday.

“It was electric,” Kwiatkowski said. “I remember just how comfortable he was on stage for a middle-school boy. It was amazing. I thought to myself, ‘The stage is his home. This kid is going to do great things’.”

Pity the poor student in the talent show who had to follow the now-global superstar.

The iconic performance preceded a one-in-a-million journey to international stardom.

Bazzi’s talent exploded onto the world’s music scene in 2012 when he began posting covers of songs on his YouTube channel.

Here comes the fame

Fast forward to 2015 — one year after he moved to Los Angeles to become more entrenched in the music industry — when his number of followers on the music platform Vine exceeded 1.5 million.

He has since recorded a number of world-wide hits, including “Mine” in 2017 that ascended to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100.

But it all started for Bazzi in Canton, thanks to the then-teen’s relentless work habits and crazy-smooth voice.

“A lot of the teachers and students knew Andrew could sing because he’d always be rapping and singing in the hallways, but I don’t think they knew how good he really was,” recounted good friend Brandon Harris.

They found out quickly.

‘He blew everybody away’

“When Andrew got up on that stage, and he started performing ‘Talking to the Moon’, the room went silent,” Harris added. “Honestly, Andrew sounded better than Bruno Mars. He blew everybody away.

“When Andrew finished the song, I looked around the room and there were teachers crying. Teachers! I’ll never forget that. It was powerful.”

Bazzi’s longtime friends describe him as fun-loving, hard-working and outgoing.

“There’d be times we’d ask him to hang out or go to a movie or something and Andrew would say, ‘I’d love to, but I can’t; I have to work on my music,” Harris said.

“He saved up all the money he earned so that, when he moved to Los Angeles, he could pay for the studio time he needed. He had a dream and he never let it go.”

Great personality

“I have never met a more outgoing person,” longtime friend Noah Saad added. “He was always laughing, smiling, telling jokes … trying to make everyone around him feel good.”

Canton native Kurtis Roy was an experienced music producer artist and operations manager for Seattle-based Hairball Audio heard about Bazzi’s immense skills and invited him to record in his basement studio.

“The odds of a kid coming out of (southeast Michigan) and making it to the Billboard Top 40 are, well, insane,” said Roy. “One in a million, maybe?

“That said, just having Bazzi’s talent and the way he could sing, I’m not surprised at all at how far he’s risen in such a short time. When you’re talented, you believe in yourself and you work your tail off like Bazzi’s done, anything is possible.”

‘Garbage’ was actually gold

Roy remembers vividly the days when he’d pick up Bazzi at Canton High School — “He was too young to drive at that time,” Roy recalled — and taking him to his basement recording studio to work on songs.

“Even though Andrew was really, really good, my parents would yell down the basement at us, ‘What is that garbage?!’,” Roy said, smiling. “Looking back now, it’s pretty funny.”

A large percentage of Bazzi’s friends drew Plymouth as their high school, “so when he drew Canton, he was bumming a little bit,” Harris reminisced.

“A lot of his friends were athletes — he would have been, if not for his commitment to music — so when he hung out with us, we’d give him our (Plymouth) letter jackets to wear.”

Loyal to his friends

“When I talk to him now, he’s changed a little, but only because he’s more driven than before,” Saad during a recent interview. “He not only wants to be successful, he wants to sustain it.”

Harris described how, during a Camila Cabello concert at The Fillmore Detroit, with Bazzi serving as the opening act, people throughout the crowd were singing the lyrics from “Mine.”

“And it wasn’t just people from around Detroit, there were people from all over Michigan and the Midwest,” Harris said.

“I think that’s the moment I realized my good friend had arrived.”