SoCalled
Yiddish Hip Hop-an intriguing concept. But when you listen to Socalled, it suddenly seems to make sense. At first glance, Josh Dolgin may seem to be slight intellectual but not far beneath lurks a bona fide rebel, an unconventional, wild MC who is breathing a breath of fresh air into Jewish music.
Dolgin is a young Canadian in his thirties who grew up with hip hop. That explains part of it. Breakbeat was his first influence, the one that predominated throughout his years at McGill University in Montreal. At that point he knew nothing of the music of his culture, since his parents never really listened to it... until the day when, rifling through records at the Salvation Army, searching for that special sample, he came upon an old album by Aaron Lebedeff, a popular post-war Yiddish singer. "It wasn't as if I'd found a James Brown or anything. But the cover had cool colors, the guy looked interesting, so I brought it home... and then - it was like a slap in the face - totally incredible."
A bit of serendipity quickly led to a passion. Socalled now has accumulated no less than 3,000 records of Jewish music, most of them 78's, dug up from the 1920s, 30s and 40s. He does musicology workshops on the subject, so he doesn't mess around with tradition-well, actually he does, but with a healthy respect for it.
"I'm trying to create something new, but also to continue something old. I've studied the history of this music and I want to see where we can take it today."
Yiddish hip hop. With his innate talent for blending a traditional hassidic chant with an old school breakbeat, Socalled systematically steals the show. David Krakauer, another innovator of the traditional, cited him has an inspiration when he came out with his first opus, The Hip Hop Seder, an iconoclastic homage to the Jewish Easter, Pesach. Who else would be capable of pairing rapper Killah Priest of Wu-Tang Clan with a verse of the Old Testament? Today, Krakauer collaborates regularly with Socalled: one result is the lavish album Bubbemeises. The clarinetist also appears, with his trumpeter colleague, Frank London, on HipHopKhasene (2003), another mind-blowing collaboration of Socalled with Sophie Solomon, the violonist of Oi Va Voi. That's how Socalled is, very willing to share. His new album, Ghettoblaster, is resounding proof. Recorded in a dozen studios, it includes the participation of forty or so musicians. The Yiddish singer Theodore Bikel, the kletzmer group Beyond the Pale, rapper Sans Pression from Quebec, his friend Gonzalez, 90-year-old lounge pianist Irving Fields, the inventor of latino-kletzmer music with his Bagels and Bongos in the 1960s.
Yiddish hip hop. The terms are strikingly incongruous for upholders of the tradition. The excellent Mickey Katz, sound engineer for Spike Jones, summed it up in his biography: "I make albums that are too silly for Jews and not silly enough for non-Jews." Socalled speaks to this in his own way, "I hope that you don't have to be Jewish to enjoy my music and that, if you are Jewish, you won't hate it, but will find it cool. I'm trying to create something that people will enjoy." Just good old-fashioned music.