Matt Sircely is a songwriter and multi-instrumentalist living in Port Townsend known for his exuberant nature and enthusiasm for all sorts of music. A fluid improvisor on mandolin, guitar, octave mandolin, and four and five string tenor guitars, Matt is on call for lap steel at the local honky tonk and often can be found playing swing, blues or bluegrass fiddle. Truth is, out of everything, he’s probably best at storytelling in songwriting. No Depression has described Matt Sircely’s songwriting as “timeless”.
Musically, Matt’s interests span the worlds of folk and fiddle music, classic blues and country, vintage swing and bluegrass, and music from around the world. A founding member of the string swing ensemble Hot Club Sandwich, Matt appears on the most recent Hot Club Sandwich album No Pressure alongside mandolin master David Grisman on half of the tracks.
As an instrumentalist, Matt Sircely has performed extensively in a breadth of stylistic 
contexts such as folk, blues, Tejano roots music, klezmer and other Jewish music, country bands and bluegrass outfits, everything from the old-time square dancecommunity to the Seattle jazz scene. His musical interests extend to the many folk styles from around the world. Most recently, he has been cultivating a deep passion for fiddle tunes related to his ancestral roots in Southwestern Pennsylvania.
In 2008, Sircely co-founded a roots fusion band with the late great Joseph Mascorella on drums and vocals. Together, they worked for years striving to reach new heights in composition and improvisation. Matt has also performed in duo format with many artists, including songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Danny Barnes, who also produced his first album of all original songs. Sircely and Barnes also released an album recorded live in California which included several of Matt’s own songs.
As a music writer on assignment for the Fretboard Journal and other music magazines, Sircely has researched and written articles about legendary artists including Andy Statman, Wade Mainer, Juan Reynoso, Angel Tavira, Radim Zenkl, Hamilton de Holanda, Lee Stripling, Calvin Vollrath, Buell Neidlinger, Danny Barnes, and the founding of the David Grisman Quintet.
At his home on the Olympic Peninsula, Matt Sircely is always writing songs and producing new recordings. He enjoys spending time in his vegetable garden and programming the music lineups at his local farmers markets. As a teacher, he has provided adjunct mandolin instruction at Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle, and has made annual visits over the years to teach in places like Washington, Idaho, British Colombia, Louisiana and California. Over the years, Matt has introduced hundreds of mandolin students to their first swing tunes on mandolin. Locally, he served as band director in a public school during the pandemic, then led the strings program at a nearby private school in 2024.
Early years
Matt started writing songs when he was still young enough to climb the Philly Folk Fest mainstage scaffolding while his father took photos for the newspaper (David Bromberg was onstage, Matt performed with him twenty years hence). Matt grew up spinning his parents’ records and tuning into Gene Shay’s folk show, and 15 years later, Shay invited his duo to represent Philadelphia at the NE Folk Alliance. Working through college as a guitarist and songwriter, Sircely first studied guitar formally in Central America. The following year, he brought his new mandolin to a jazz improvisation course. 
Moving to the Northwest in 1999, Matt Sircely became a founding member of the Seattle-based swing band Hot Club Sandwich. The group toured the West Coast, performing and recording with the great Dan Hicks in 2010. The same year, Matt appeared on the cover of Mandolin Magazine.
A California tour with acclaimed banjoist Danny Barnes yielded a live duo album in 2013, Sircely and Barnes Live. Two years later, Barnes produced Sircely’s first release of all-original songs, some of which were fashioned as ‘remixes’ in Humdinger Process. Sircely is now working towards releasing a larger collection of songs with Barnes appearing on electric bass alongside award-winning guitarist Chris Luquette.
Sircely co-produced the 2018 release from Hot Club Sandwich, No Pressure, featuring a guest appearance from master mandolinist David Grisman. No Pressure rose to #18 of the Folk DJ charts, also the 
Top 30 of the CMJ Jazz charts and the Relix/Jamband charts. One of Sircely’s songs served as theme music for the program Freetown Radio in Lafayette, LA for over a year, a song which No Depression described as ‘timeless’.
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More biographical background:
Matt Sircely is a songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and independent journalist living in the shadow of the Olympic Mountains near Port Townsend, Washington. Sircely is best known for his work as a founding member of Hot Club Sandwich, a Django-inspired ensemble in Seattle, and a leading acoustic jazz band in the US for more than a decade.
Sircely has performed with many of the his major influences, including David Grisman, David Bromberg, Buell Neidlinger and Danny Barnes. His first teacher, Barry Mitterhoff, has invited Sircely to stand in for him at major venues from New York’s City Center to the Kentucky Performing Arts Center. In 2010, Mandolin Magazine placed Sircely on the cover.
With mandolin work characterized by a full, warm tone and the ability to express emotion in a broad range of music forms and traditions, Sircely’s discography covers everything from old-time to classic country, jazz to bluegrass, folk, blues and rock.
Born to a family of journalists in the historic village of Wycombe, Pennsylvania, Sircely started young as a songwriter, inspired by the history and landscape surrounding his hometown. When he was about eight years old, Matt’s photojournalist father took him to the Philadelphia Folk Festival, letting him climb high on the mainstage scaffolding, which left Matt with the impression that music could become a career. Soon after, Matt found his mother’s vinyl relics, left over from her days as a college radio DJ during the folk revival. His mother showed him a few guitar chords, Sircely began writing songs at age thirteen. He played his first public performance in between the sets of a bluegrass band in West Virginia at age seventeen.
By the time he saved enough to buy a mandolin at age 20, Matt was already working through Hamilton College as a musician playing folk, rock and blues, often on electric slide guitar. While studying sustainable development and investigating the shady secrets of global agricultural trade, Sircely traveled to Costa Rica, where he received his first formal guitar instruction from an elderly master don Serman Zunica, who taught him mostly classic Mexican boleros. He then took a job community organizing in Idaho, where he found his first mandolin. Returning to his senior year in college, Sircely proposed bringing a mandolin to his jazz improvisation class. The professor, “Doc” Mike Woods, was hesitant yet he agreed.
After graduating in 1998, Sircely moved back to Pennsylvania and secured a daily gig playing old-time music and leading tours on actual mule barges in Delaware Canal State Park. Pursuing serious guidance on his mandolin technique, Sircely sought out Barry Mitterhoff for lessons in North Jersey. Inspired by a few adventurous friends, Sircely realized that he could leave his hometown with little more than his instruments to street perform across the country until he found the perfect place to settle. He packed his F-5 and his guitar to traverse the country, eventually settling in Port Townsend, WA. One of the first things he did was create the opening soundtrack to the first short film ever to show at the first Port Townsend Film Festival in 2000.
On the West Coast, Sircely found swing to be standard jam fare among acoustic musicians at parties and festivals, and he began to put jazz concepts he had learned into practice. In 2000, he joined Hot Club Sandwich, a young band of creative individuals who shared a love of Django Reinhardt’s music and the jazz tradition it inspired. Operating as a collective, Hot Club Sandwich also incorporates other influences that members bring into the mix, including Latin American folkloric traditions. Within two years, the group was performing at some of the first Django-style jazz festivals to appear on the West Coast.
In 2004, Sircely teamed up with James Seward, a fellow songwriter who he previously had worked with in Pennsylvania. The two recorded First Born Son, produced by British punk rock pioneer Steve Garvey who joined the Buzzcocks shortly after the Anarchy in the UK tour. They toured swing states, organizing voter drives, and taking their their politically-charged folk songs to independent radio stations. In Philadelphia, Sircely met David Bromberg who invited him to accompany him in the Concerts for Change series. Philadelphia’s legendary folk DJ Gene Shay, who Sircely had listened to while growing up, supported the duo by inviting them to perform for the DJ showcase at the 2004 Northeast Regional Folk Alliance.
At the Folk Alliance, Barry Mitterhoff referred Sircely as a potential substitue to clarinetist Margot Leverett and The Klezmer Mountain Boys, comprised of great New York City pickers, including Marty Confurius, Kenny Kosek and Joe Selly. Sircely performed with the Klezmer Mountain Boys, playing both klezmer and bluegrass in venues including New York’s City Center and the Kentucky Performing Arts Center.
Back in Port Townsend, Sircely began to play some gigs with master banjoist and songwriter Danny Barnes, which inspired him to the core. In 2004, when he applied to the first Mandolin Symposium, David Grisman and Mike Marshall hired Matt on as a teaching assistant. Sircely assisted in arranging “Minor Swing” for a mandolin ensemble, which he directed alongside Don Stiernberg. For the 2005 Mandolin Symposium, Sircely wrote copy for the student manual and led the swing jams with Hot Club Sandwich guitarist (at the time) Greg Ruby. Sircely assisted throughout the first six years of the Mandolin Symposium.
Raised by two journalists, Sircely also combines writing and photography with his love of music. In 2005, David Grisman asked him to compile the liner notes for his Tone Poets project, a historic assembly of 42 musicians, each playing Grisman’s mandolin or guitar. In the same year, Sircely began contributing to the Fretboard Journal and Strings, finding deep inspiration in researching the lives and work of some his musical heroes like Wade Mainer, Andy Statman and Juan Reynoso.
In 2008, Sircely contributed an original composition to Galen Garwood’s short film Ed & Ed, which first appeared at the Port Townsend Film Festival. Two of his compositions, written to accompany the poetry of the beloved James Broughton, were included in ‘Letters from James,’ a film by Garwood and Rowan James which was the first film to appear at the first PTFF.
Sircely performed in the debut of bass legend Buell Neidlinger’s group he called the Prairie Ramblers on Whidbey Island. Matt also traveled to record on electric mandola with Kelley Breiding’s classic country group Kelley and the Cowboys in a session featuring Ray Wood on guitar with Joel Savoy producing, engineering and playing fiddle in the legendary Whirlybird in Opelousas, Louisiana.
In 2008, Sircely recorded with Lee Stripling, Paul Anastasio and Rich Levine for Swing Cat Records in a session that featured Lee’s approach to the music of his father, Charlie Stripling, Alabama’s most legendary old-time fiddler. Sircely also played as a sideman in various formats in groups led by David Jacobs-Strain.
Matt Sircely is board president of the Andy Mackie Music Foundation.
Besides his solo work and performances with Hot Club Sandwich, Matt Sircely has performed with:
- Danny Barnes – always fun to pick
- Orville Johnson – produced the second Hot Club Sandwich record
- Phillips Saylor – nom de plume Stripmall Ballads
- Choroloco – super fun Seattle group
- David Jacobs-Strain – roots blues, modern songs and grooves
- Jacob Navarro – co-founder of Spoonshine
- Kelley and the Cowboys – classic country
- Buell Neidlinger and the Prairie Ramblers – Buellgrass
- Faith Petric – the Fort Knox of Folk Music
- Ann Savoy and her Sleepless Knights
- Miho Takekawa & Diego Coy – Japan meets Colombia
- Dan Hicks – w/ Hot Club Sandwich as the backing band
- Margot Leverett & the Klezmer Mountain Boys – filling in for Barry Mitterhoff.
- Shannon Saunders and the Splinters – Great Canadian songwriter
- Peter Seigel – VT songwriter
- Lauren Sheehan – Portland’s String Queen
- Baby Gramps – no description would be adequate
- Blackberry Bushes – produced “Little Bit of Grace”
Matt Sircely appeared as a guest with:
- Paul Anastasio and the Fire of Tierra Caliente – playing guitar parts in the music of Juan Reynoso
- Bobby Black, Mike Dowling and Joel Savoy during the 2006 Port Townsend Slide and Steel Festival
- David Bromberg – PT Blues Fest 2010, Concerts for Change in 2004
- Ray Bonneville – soulful songwriter from Austin
- Almir Cortes – brilliant mandolinist/guitarist from Sao Paulo
- David Grisman Quintet – at the Moore in Seattle
- Jim Hinde – beloved Northwest songwriter
- Kitchen Syncopators – legendary supergroup
- Tcha Limberger and Robin Nolan – Django in June final concert 2013
- Mud Bay Jugglers – With HCS at the Country Fair
- Jim Page – the legendary Seattle songwriter
- Paperboys – convinced Matt to move west in ’99
- Pearl Django – Renowned Seattle Gypsy Jazz Band
- Joey Pipia – magician/comedian
- Smerdvakov Karamazov – at the Moisture Fest
- Dusty Rodz and her Handsome Cowboy
- Greg Ruby – Senior Recital at Cornish College of the Arts
- Members of the Savoy Family Cajun Band and Marley’s Ghost – 2005 dance
- Taarka – good friends
- Taos Hum – SF jam band
- Steve Webber – of the Holy Modal Rounders. His 1998 appearance on WBAI was his first in 20 years. Steve offered the winning bid to buy Matt’s mandolin.
- Lee Stripling – Son of legendary AL fiddler Charlie Stripling
- Vagabond Opera – legendary Portland group
- Vinyl – SF funk outfit
- Zany Umbrella Circus – at the Country Fair
- Radim Zenkl – renowned Czech mandolin innovator
- Zazou – Seattle Django jazz band
