Frank Viele June 21, 2008

Put simply, a Frank Viele show is a thinking mans party where all the thoughts are good ones and, even better, you can dance to them. Ive seen Frank Viele and The Manhattan Project twice now and, both shows, no one in the audience needed to be told to get up and dance; dancing is just the natural human reaction to the music coming from the stage. Vieles tunes are so alive, the melodic and intricate vocal lines so engaging, they open a door for an audience to dance on in, have a dialogue with the band, and become quickly en rapt as they hear a story or two. And thats what the songs are, "stories", stories in the best sense: small scenarios of emotional truth told through music. When I heard Vieles first single off his Blue Roses For Two EP, Bein Lonely Together, I was impressed (as were others...the song peaked at 16 on the Top 100 Underground Singles Chart and can be heard all along the east coast on college radio, Rhapsody Radio and Sirius Radio) and I still am, but the live shows make the word impressed a poor poor term indeed to describe the experience of Vieles music. Viele began playing at age three, teaching himself the theme songs to his favorite television shows on his grandmothers piano and you can tell, watching him, that the mans a natural performer, been playing to the crowd all his life. He moved on from TV theme songs to making the piano sing the melodies of Sam Cooke, Stevie Wonder and Billy Joel and then moved from piano to guitar, falling in love with Jazz music at a Berklee College of Music Summer Session. With the guitar came a different set of musical icons to model: Dave Matthews and Dylan, then Wes Montgomery, Grant Green, George Benson and Eric Krasno. To see Viele on stage, or to listen to his first record, you know you are in the presence of someone who knows his instrument, who knows what that instrument can do and, uncannily, who has that musicians sixth sense of knowing what it is an audience needs to hear, and how it should be phrased. From the age of three on theres no doubt Frank Viele has learned well from his musical mentors. It is no surprise to learn that Viele has, already in his young career, shared the stage with acts the calibre of The Spin Doctors, Stephen Kellog & The Sixers, Keller Williams, Nine Days and Marc Broussard; he seems naturally a part of the music world and entirely at home on the stage. Frank Viele shows extraordinary skill at entertaining any crowd, large or small, whatever their musical orientation, and sending every member of the audience out of the club or down the sidewalk singing songs in their heads and dancing to the rhythm of memory.

Event submitted by Eventful.com on behalf of MochaMayas.