“I think everybody in the whole world don’t have confidence in themselves. I certainly don’t. But that doesn’t stop me”. This is the statement that Josh Socalled Dolgin announces himself with, in the Documentary “the Socalled Movie”, by the National Film Board of Canada. In his Official website, he declares to be both a pianist and a puppet maker, as well as a journalist and a magician, a cartoon drawer and a cookbooks writer: each activity, even the most unusual and bizarre, is regarded with the same dignity and importance for his artistic development.
The world, however, knows him as a Canadian rapper and producer, whose peculiarity is mixing different genres with Klezmer, the musical tradition of the Ashkenazi Jews of Eastern Europe. He managed to put together a unique and heterogeneous band of “virtual soul musicians that for some reason put trust in me”: Fred Wesley, Katie Moore, Irving Fields and Drime1. His six solo albums we list below are only one of his many achievements and activities: their peculiar titles are respectively HiphopKhasene (2003); Consensus: Live in Concert (2005); The So Called Seder: A Hip Hop Haggadah (2005); Ghettoblaster (2007); SleepOver (2011); The Season (2013).
He led events such as the “Klezmer Cruise” down the Dnieper River in Ukraine, the Jewish Festival of Lights with the seasonal concert “Hip Hop Hanukkah”, the Yiddish gangster puppet musical “Isaac Babel’s Odessa Stories”, not to mention the countless master classes he held in music festivals. With his work, our artist explores and disseminates Yiddish culture. At the same time, his Ukrainian, Romanian and Russian roots led him to challenge himself in teaching and playing music in every continent: he believes that “it’s not political, it’s not religious, it’s just music”. His art knows no boundary of any type, no matter what.
We recommend his peculiar official website, filled with his most popular musical videos: https://www.socalledmusic.com/
Here follows the trailer of “the Socalled movie”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPZGs2wZbUo
What about checking out a few songs? We particularly liked these examples of mixing genres:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFdvzH24LP8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EY8ZN6tcwt4
If you want to witness his performances, do not hesitate to visit our Facebook page to discover our events!
Waterlines Project 