Matt Tolentino, who shares a birthday with Fred Astaire, was born May 10, 1985 in Dallas, TX. He was not born 80 years too late- rather, he is placed in the perfect time- the present day- to preserve the music of generations past, to bring the music of yesterday to the modern audience of today.
Beginning his musical venture at 11, Matt picked up the clarinet to play in the band at Stonewall Jackson Elementary. He played clarinet exclusively until he entered his sophomore year of high school, when he branched out and added saxophone, tuba and accordion, which he spent the entire summer learning. The accordion was Matt’s first musical love, even before he could play – very contrary to his generation, ‘The Lawrence Welk Show’ was part of his usual television viewing. Matt never missed an episode, and for the longest time the thought never occurred to him that these were in fact old shows!
He returned to school in 2007, and stayed with it for a while before finally yielding to the temptation of doing music full-time. The same year Matt met one of his good friends, Drew Nugent, a very talented cornetist and pianist from Philadelphia. Upon seeing Drew’s success with his own bands, Matt decided to put his own together and thus his Singapore Slingers orchestra was born.
The Slingers play a wide variety of musical styles, including “rag-a-jazz,” a coin termed by New York’s Dan Levinson, which spotlights the brief period in music between ragtime and jazz (the late teens and early twenties).
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