Socalled

Josh Dolgin operates from a Montreal base as a music producer, pianist, and accordionist, generating an eclectic strain of hip-hop under the performing name Socalled. Into this animated blend of sung and rapped material he folds klezmer, folk music, and funk. His first album took shape as a partnership with British composer Sophie Solomon and appeared under the title HiphopKhasene on Piranha in 2003. Clarinetist David Krakauer performed as a guest on that project, and Dolgin repaid the appearance by joining Krakauer on Live in Krakow, issued the same year by Label Bleu. Beyond the Pale’s Consensus: Live in Concert from 2005 carried a contribution from Dolgin; that identical year he placed The So Called Seder: A Hip Hop Haggadah with JDub Records. Ghettoblaster surfaced next in 2006 on the French imprint Bleu Electric and reached the United States through JDub in 2007.

The National Film Board of Canada produced the 2010 documentary The Socalled Movie about Dolgin, after which Lorber Films handled its American theatrical distribution. SleepOver arrived in 2011 and enlisted rapper Roxanne Shante, vocalist Katie Moore, and then-95-year-old pianist Irving Fields. Dare to Care Records issued the cast recording of his puppet musical The Season two years later; alongside Dolgin the sessions featured Moore, Yves Lambert, Rich Ly, and Yassin Alsalman, known as Narcy. The same label released 2015’s People Watching, populated by more than two dozen guests that included Narcy, Moore, Lambert, and Ly, and followed it in 2017 with Tales from Odessa, “A Socalled Yiddish Musical.”