socalled live at the jcc

365 day fifty-five: good ol' days

Josh is thrilled that I recorded his Vancouver gig, which makes me happy, and mitagates all possible feelings of uncertainty that I might have had in presenting it to you, my dear readers.

So, without further ado: My bootleg of SOCALLED Live at the JCC.

Socalled is liberally funky, flawlessly presenting a wicked klezmer fusion of extraordinary experiment, featuring intelligent jazz, sparkling piano, and witty hip-hop, mildly accented with a surprising dash of country. The musicianship displayed is blinding. All that and he’s charming.

My little recording doesn’t capture even a tenth of how impossibly good the music was, but it might give you enough of an idea to make sure you don’t miss the next chance you have to attend one of the concerts. I’d rather accidentally fall on a knife.

Socalledmusic.com
Socalled on MySpace

!! oh my holy yes Yes YES !!

SOCALLED
Direct from Montreal
Vancouver Premiere

The Chutzpah Festival says:

“It’s funny that rap brought Jewish kid Josh Dolgin (Socalled) to Jewish music. Searching for records to sample while studying at McGill, he stumbled across some old Jewish folk music. The result is his hybrid style of Jewish hip-hop and album titles like The Socalled Seder. Montreal-based Dolgin was born in Ottawa and raised in Chelsea, Quebec. He played the piano as a kid and the accordion in high school and was in all sorts of bands: salsa, gospel, rock, funk. Then he discovered hip-hop and MIDI, and the rest is history. He’s appeared on many albums as pianist, singer, arranger, rapper, writer, and producer. He also rocks with fellow klezmerhybrid musician David Krakauer in Klezmer Madness!, sings with Toronto’s Beyond the Pale, performs with Shtreiml in Montreal, and with LA-based the Aleph Project. Socalled performs and records with “a crew of mixed-up freaks and geniuses” from around the world, including Killah Priest, Susan Hoffman-Watts, Frank London and Irving Fields.

When: Sunday, February 24 at 9:00 pm
Where: Norman Rothstein Theatre, JCCGV

Tickets are $25 and can be purchased from Tickets Tonight.

socalled music

I have a new musical obsession.

Socalled.

Brainchild of musician, photographer, magician and writer, Josh Dolgin, they’re a Jewish-culture Montreal Jazz-Klezmer Hip-Hop group with shimmering 1920’s piano and Romanian/Latin-American percussion.

Seriously.

Their latest single, You are Never Alone, begins with a soft clip, reminiscent of The Avalanches, and drops down into a catchy riff which positively throbs with promise, clearing the way for a theatrical bout of MC story-telling. It all works exceptionally well with the video, a fantastical transformation of Mr. Dolgin into a complicated, high-tech re-imagining of an antique theatre. (You might remember their rough video with (these are the) good old days too).

“Truly these are the good old days where man, woman, and child can all log on the internet and text message each other across their own house, where there is any form of contraceptive from solid, liquid, to gas, we have reached the point of civilization like the Incans reached when they had gold roads and the Egyptians reached when they had, like, magical buildings and secret things, so what you do is you kiss whoever you kiss, grab whoever you grab, because these are truly the good old days and it does not get any better than this. When it does you wake up and then you’re dead.”

I’ve had their latest album, Ghettoblaster, on infinite repeat since I found a copy. I can’t not. From the clever intro, the sound of someone slotting a cassette into a car tape-deck, to the bonus hidden remix track, it’s eclectic, relevant, wickedly smart, funny, and perishingly sexy. It groans and grins, powerfully melodic, full of cultural anthropology, swinging horn solos, splashes of Yiddish rap, layers of juicy, highly literate rhythms, and a willowy, elegantly stretched sense of timing. Even unexpected clips of musicians talking in the studio are beautiful, adding a charming depth of personality and character to moments that might have been weak without them. As a hint, their wikipedia entry states some of their almost inexplicable, modern style as “…drums & bass and other types of folk music.”

It’s only when you start to really listen do you realize how gracefully strange their punchy melding of cultures really is, how tightly they wove what should have been a vocal sprawl. Every song is really its own mysterious and wonderfully imaginative mood, an entire exploration into genre. Each time I pay attention, another thread of creativity manifests. Banjo, for example, it has banjo? I missed that it’s practically glittering with banjo? Yes, apparently, I think, rewinding and playing again. How rare.

BUY THE ALBUM: it’s not even $10.
(find them on MySpace)
(the socalled video blog)