Flux Candrix

Flux Candrix was written for the New Thread Saxophone Quartet in the winter of 2016/2017. This piece toys with the history of the saxophone, an instrument invented by Alphonso Sax in Belgium and first gaining widespread adoration through American Jazz and Swing music in the first half of the 20th century. I was interested in the oddity that is the early European version of jazz music and what was lost and gained in its appropriation and voyage over the Atlantic. Examples from Krenek’s Johnny Spielt Auf and portions of Stravinsky’s L’histoire du soldat provide perfect cases of quirky European translations of Jazz. The Belgian saxophone player and band leader, Fud Candrix, was a leading figure in European jazz and swing in the 1930s and 1940s. After Nazi Germany loosened laws regarding the performance of the so-called degenerate American jazz music, Candrix performed with his big band in the posh casinos of Baden Baden for Germany’s elite citizenry. A propaganda film that featured these lavish Baden Baden casinos (including a fashion show complete with kimono prop) is scored with Candrix’s song, Spaziergang. It is this song that provided the basic materials for this piece, in a certain sense bringing the music back over the Atlantic to the United States, forming what could be a translation of a translation. This piece does not begin with overtly referential material from Spaziergang, instead moving towards it gradually, creating an original form and narrative arc using obscured references and allusions. Fud Candrix is associated primarily with his music, and one could defend his subservience with the claim that he was simply an apolitical musician who found himself in the service of the Third Reich by circumstance. On the other hand, all art is political and artists have a choice to face the politics of their time. As the human race presently approaches what feels like a tipping point, the story of Fud Candrix could illuminate some of the complexities of being an individual working on the sidelines of power.