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 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. Viele's 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 that's what the songs are, "stories", stories in the best sense: small scenarios of emotional truth told through music. When I heard Viele's 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 Viele's music.

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 the age of three 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 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. In his club performance on April 13, 2007 at The Chance in Poughkeepsie, NY, Viele and his band, 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 (where, incidentally, he won the first prize in the band competition) 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 the music of Frank Viele. there's simply nothing else you want to do.

-- Joshua Mark

"an Old Soul with a Fresh Sound" (Generator Magazine)

FRANK VIELE: Blue Roses For Two A melodic approach to combining jazz and funk guitar with emotionally charged lyrics and acoustic singer/songwriter stylings.

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