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Put simply, a Frank Viele show is a thinking man's party where all the thoughts are good ones and, even better, you can dance to them. I've seen Frank Viele & The Manhattan Project twice now, and at 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. Viele's tunes are so alive and 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 enrapt as they hear a story or two.
And that's just what the songs are... "stories", and stories in the best sense: small scenarios of emotional truth told through music. When I heard Viele's first single, "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. Even still, the word "impressed" is a poor term to describe the experience of Viele's music live. Viele began playing at age three, teaching himself the theme songs to his favorite television shows on his grandmother's piano, and you can tell, watching him, that the man's 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 musician's sixth sense of knowing what it is an audience needs to hear and how it should be phrased. From an early age on there's 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 Stephen Kellog & The Sixers, Keller Williams, Ingrid Michaelson, Chris Barron (Spin Doctors), 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 his melodies in their heads and dancing to the rhythm of memory. In his club performance on April 13, 2007 at The Chance in Poughkeepsie, NY, Frank Viele & The Manhattan Project turned the bar into an intimate gathering of friends coming together to share an evening's entertainment, and at the African Relief Benefit of April 29, 2007 at Marist College performing before a wholly different sort of crowd, he moved people of all ages up onto their dancing feet... and who could blame them. When you're there at a show and you experience Frank Viele & The Manhattan Project, there's simply nothing else you want to do.
A hand selected member of the prestigious New York Singer Songwriter Sessions, Frank Viele and the band are currently working in the studio on their first full-length release due out in 2009. In the meantime, you can find them in venues around the Northeast doing what they do best: telling the truth through their music and making the people dance. * Joshua Mark is a freelance writer and former Hemingway and Chaucerian scholar. He has taught writing, philosophy, history, and literature courses for the University of Maryland and Marist College. |
