Dear Uncle Lennie is the new project of pianist and composer Camille-Alban Spreng. A bit like Japanese haiku, each piece in this repertoire for muted piano, guitar and banjo represents an idea, a fantasized story, a furtive image towards a picturesque landscape. The guiding ideas are raw, condensed, and highly evocative. The short pieces follow one another, mixing jazz, folk, and improvised music, and create a mythological fresco whose stories would be told without words, by musical evocation and with the help of the listener's imagination.
How to create tales through music that are as powerful and evocative as those stories we were told by the fire, as children?
This music was guided by the sounds of Marco Giongrandi on banjo and Benjamin Sauzereau on guitar. The piano strings were muted or prepared to match the aesthetic dictated by the unique blend of these two sounds. The writing itself was inspired by stories of the American Civil War, fireside tales, cornfields, and songwriters such as Leonard Cohen, Patrick Watson, Sufjan Stevens...