Even voorstellen - Dear Uncle Lennie - 'Sister Juniper', album
Camille-Alban Spreng, Benjamin Sauzereau, Marco Giongrandi, Joachim Badenhorst
'Sister Juniper', album (cd/vinyl/digital)
BMC Records
Release date: 26th September 2025
Camille-Alban Spreng | Spotify
"To one degree or another, we all have an intimate relationship with stories: those we tell by the fireside, those we've lived or dreamed, those drawn from films, folklore or fairy tales. Each, in its own way, feeds our need for the imaginary, our desire to escape. When pianist and composer Camille-Alban Spreng founded Dear Uncle Lennie in 2022, it was with this very desire: to question the evocative power of stories, without words, through brief instrumental forms. The project takes the form of a chamber trio with guitarist Benjamin Sauzereau and banjoist Marco Giongrandi, recurring companions and players on the Brussels jazz scene.
The band's first album, initiated this work on the short, intimate format inspired in particular by the art of haiku. The underlying theme is a fantasized America: that of the gold rush, westerns and great family frescoes as anchors. An imaginary world developed in eighteen brief, rawly expressed titles, dotted with mysterious places and characters with a constant concern to suggest rather than show. Like its predecessor, ‘Sister Juniper’ is a collection of snapshots. Twelve tracks, this time more variable in length (between one and eight minutes), but all sharing the same allusive quest. ‘Dear Niece Thelma’, ‘Two Is Not An Army’ or ‘Behind The Barn Grew Three Little Trees’: so many equivocal, photogenic song titles, where the shadow of an intimate epic is outlined. At least, we're guessing, from the family members, mysterious numbers, house settings deployed here like clues to an uneventful plot, a disjointed narrative whose chapters have been deliberately jumbled.
So, where do we stand here? The album is, in a way, the second season of this musical and family laboratory. With a few differences: in addition to the original miniatures, there are longer pieces, more complex in their narration. ‘Daniele’, for example, starts off with a whimsical energy before unfolding with astonishing delicacy, or the polyrthymic ‘Platoon Five’, gradually developing into a joyous, solar trance. Some tracks are minimalist, contemplative, while others are achieved through the accumulation and interweaving of sound sources. The guitar electrifies the acoustic sources, the banjo deepens the suggestive expression of the whole, the piano is inspired by fingerpicking, blurring the registers. The aim is always the same: to expand the labyrinth of forms employed, to lead us astray without ever losing us in these landscapes with their false airs of an imaginary OST.
The trio extended these explorations by entrusting the recording and mixing of their album to producer Koen Gisen, renowned for his approach to recording and accurate reproduction of acoustic sources. This collaboration is complemented by that of Antwerp clarinettist Joachim Badenhorst, who is featured on certain pieces. This wind instrument provides a means of counterbalancing the short, percussive sounds induced by strummed and struck strings.
Musically, ‘Sister Juniper’ extends the atmosphere of the first album, with its willingness to visit several traditions and genres without ever settling on one. Folk songwriting rubs shoulders with minimalist, repetitive music, jazz meets country in a wide variety of instrumental expressions. Here and there, we can detect many inspirations: Sufjan Stevens, Daniel Rossen or Bill Frisell, to name but a few. But it would be a betrayal of the project’s originality to link it to the artists from whom it borrows, since the aim is more to create a new folklore, free as possible from all conventions.
‘Sister Juniper’ is all of these things: an album of mysterious fantasy and musical freedom, leaving the listener free to venture into his or her own world and make it their own. It's like a fireside where stories come to life and transform themselves to the level of dream we wish; we're free to add our own. » - Booklet text by Romain Besnard
Dear Uncle Lennie is a trio formed in 2022 by pianist and composer Camille-Alban Spreng with guitarist Benjamin Sauzereau and Marco Giongrandi on banjo. The three musicians share many common projects and over the past 10 years have developed a common affinity for intimate and sensitive music, experimental research and creation of new musical languages. The trio released their first album in 2022 on Yolk Records (Victoire du jazz 2019 - Best Label). The project was awarded Revelation Jazz Magazine in the December 2022 issue, 4 stars in Le Soir, and the music was broadcast on France Inter, Fip Radio, Musique 3, BX1, Klara, etc. It was also well received by the public, which allowed the project, after a first Belgian release tour (Ghent, Brussels, Antwerp, Grimbergen, Eupen), to do another tour in Italy in March 2023 at the invitation of the Bergamo Jazz Festival (Bergamo, Milano, Genova, Brescia). Over the years, the trio has developed a unique group sound and proved to be a fantastic creative playground. These experiences inspired them to collaborate with Antwerp clarinettist Joachim Badenhorst and Ghent producer Koen Gisen on a new album 'Sister Juniper' to be released on BMC Records.
The trio's main idea is to create a repertoire inspired by small, compact and highly evocative poetic forms, and to apply to it a folk universe and a narrative imaginarium borrowed from the classic era of songwriting - in addition to exploring the acoustic possibilities of a small ensemble composed only of strings, adapting the language of finger-picking (a typically guitaristic technique) to piano playing, and generating a trance effect by blurring the acoustic boundaries between the different instruments. In addition to the influences already present on the first album (Joanna Newsom, Leonard Cohen, Sufjan Stevens, Sam Amidon), this new repertoire with Joachim Badenhorst includes other influences from improvised music (Fred Frith and Oren Ambarchi in particular) and jazz (Bill Frisell).
At the core of the Dear Uncle Lennie project is the desire to create a warm, wholesome, unique and welcoming environment during the live shows; a fireside where stories can be told. The trio, enhanced by the presence of Joachim Badenhorst, conjures up this imaginary world to arouse curiosity and invite audiences to take an interest in new music and new forms. In this sense, through the evocative titles of the songs, the hyper-narrative compositions and the atmospheric quality of the concerts, Dear Uncle Lennie has created a world with its own characters, its own stories and its own fantasy world. As Jacques Prouvost put it in a review after the album release concert in Brussels in December 2022: The power of this trio is to take you into the unknown without losing you. To thrill you without scaring you. It is a (concept) concert in the form of a children tale or rather for adults who have retained a child soul.
Live:
24th October, Jazz Station, Brussels (BE)
29th November, Un Peu, Brussels (BE)
7th February, Opus Jazz Club, Budapest (HU)