Nashville Jazz Orchestra - Boxing Day at City Winery Nashville

City Winery Nashville Presents Nashville Jazz Orchestra - Boxing Day live on Saturday, December 26th at 7:30pm! Celebrate the holiday season with a beloved Music City tradition! Join the Nashville Jazz Orchestra, led by Director Ted Wilson, for their annual post-Christmas Boxing Day Concert live on the Main Stage at City Winery Nashville. This year’s spectacular holiday performance features acclaimed recording artist Matt Belsante as the featured guest vocalist. Backed by the NJO’s powerhouse big band lineup, Belsante will bring his smooth, classic crooner style to an extraordinary 80-90 minute set of soaring seasonal arrangements, timeless big band standards, and contemporary jazz favorites. Bring your holiday guests, enjoy City Winery’s signature table-side culinary service, and keep the festive spirit alive with world-class big band jazz. Matt Belsante (IPA: bel-SAN-tay) (born October 5, 1984) is an American big band singer/songwriter based in Nashville, Tennessee. Belsante's music encompasses jazz, pop and swing, reminiscent of the style of the crooners of the 1940s and 1950s. Matt Belsante grew up listening to old Frank Sinatra records with his Grandfather and consumed a steady diet of John Coltrane, Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Ella Fitzgerald at home. Just out of grade school, Belsante picked up the tenor sax at the age of twelve and became a standard fixture in his middle school and high school jazz bands. He soon found he had a talent for using his voice. By his Senior year at Neuqua Valley High School in Naperville, IL, Belsante had won the prestigious Louis Armstrong Jazz Award in both the vocal and instrumental categories. He was the first student from his school to achieve such a feat. Belsante taught himself to play the guitar and began composing his own music the summer before he entered Nashville’s Vanderbilt University. Before the first day of class commenced, Billy Adair, Director of the Vanderbilt/Blair School of Music Blair Big Band, had already recruited Matt to sing for the Band. Soon, Matt was directing himself, leading the Dodecaphonics, an all-male a cappella campus group. Belsante graduated from Vanderbilt in 2006 with degrees in Engineering Science and Economics. Belsante eventually came to the attention of Nashville’s well-heeled music industry following a performance of the Nashville Jazz Orchestra in 2006. That performance landed him a televised appearance as a featured entertainer for the Miss Tennessee Scholarship Pageant 2006, which eventually led him to GreenHill Music, where he recorded an album of Christmas standards for the independent label. That album, released in 2007, quickly became one of the label’s best selling holiday releases that season. Following the release of "White Christmas," CBL Properties and their advertising agency, KMT Creative Group, tapped the Nashville based audio branding company iV music group to help develop an audio brand for a national campaign advertising CBL's mall properties across the country. iV music group suggested that Belsante become both the voice and the face of the campaign. As a result, Matt was featured in a series of spots on television, radio and internet. Belsante finished recording his second album, "Blame It On My Youth," in 2008. The album is a series of covers of classic Jazz and Big Band standards, along with an original Belsante composition, "Haven't Got Much". The album was released on the Green Hill Music label in September, 2008.