Josh "Socalled" Dolgin (CA; Akkordeon, Klavier, Rap, Komposition)

is a pianist, accordionist, journalist, photographer, puppet maker, rapper, composer, magician, teacher and producer based in Montreal, Quebec.

He has lectured and led master classes in music festivals around the world, from Moscow to Paris, from London to LA, and from Krakow to San Francisco, and has performed on every continent.

With 8-ish solo albums (and one with Vulfpeck’s Jack Stratton and Michael Winograd as Yiddishe Pirat) and 6 produced musical comedies to his name, he has performed solo or with his band all over the world for more than 25 years.

His list of collaborators knows no generational, social, cultural or religious boundaries: Chilly Gonzales, Itzhak Perlman, Lhasa de Sela, Fred Wesley, Andy Statman, Adam Cohen, Boban Markovic, the Mighty Sparrow, Roxanne Shante, Irving Fields, Killah Priest, Matisyahu, Theodore Bikel, Fanfare Ciocarlia, Enrico Macias and Derrick Carter, to name-drop a few.

Dolgin was the subject of The Socalled Movie, a 2010 feature documentary produced by Gary Beitel and the National Film Board of Canada. Always active doing special projects, he toured Yiddish programs with Austria’s Lungau Big Band and Germany’s Kaiser Quartett, creates themesongs (the As It Happens remix, heard every night across the country on CBC), directed and released an indie erotica film and created a special program using first world war internment camp archives at the Weimar festival of Yiddish culture.

Amongst other things he is currently working on the next Socalled record, a musical with New York’s Folksbiene, a collaboration with Yiddish song legend Ethel Raim and is a course lecturer in the Jewish Studies department at McGill University, teaching about the history of Eastern European Yiddish music and “living the archives”.

Foto: Peter Hönnemann