Josh “Socalled” Dolgin: Transcript

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Josh Socalled Dolgin:

Got it.

Leah Roseman:

Hi, Josh Socalled Dolgin.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

Hello.

Leah Roseman:

Thank you so much for joining me. Boy, you're one of these people, I'm going to try to describe you to people who don't know who you are. Let's see. Pianist, accordionist, rapper, producer, filmmaker, puppet maker, magician, singer, composer. I would say artistic magnet. You bring all these people and genres together. What have I missed there?

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

It's a funny question these days, because it's been two years of basically being sitting in this room, so I forget what I did or what I am or what I was supposed to be doing or something. But that was a very good start. Basically I have a lot of hobbies and a lot of interests and passions and, yes, I do like to bring people together and bring the different passions together.

Leah Roseman:

So let's start with Curried Soul remix.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

Oh.

Leah Roseman:

So, any Canadians listening will probably be very familiar with the As It Happens theme, originally Moe Koffman 1969, if I'm right. And you were commissioned to remix this?

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

Yes. Well, actually it started off as a competition where they asked a bunch of producers to take this hallowed piece of Canadian culture, because really, why mess with it? It's a beautiful song, but it's also just the perfect package with that show, As It Happens, and that sound, and it's just I grew up with it, like all Canadians, and every single day hearing that awesome tune. And so the CBC has a way of trying to be hip and try to stay relevant or something. And so they think, hey, let's mess with that, let's spruce it up. So they asked a bunch of producers to deal with the material and see if they could come up with something. And they only really gave us the track, there was no multi-track recording or whatever.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

We just got the raw track. I think it was even just an MP3. I'm not even sure it was a WAV file. And so they gave it to a bunch of producers and they said, "Do something." So I went to... Actually it's a studio in Ottawa that I do all my work out of. Well, I used to before the end of the world. This family of producers with the name of Bova. And there's Phil Senior and then there's Phil Junior. And I started working with Phil Senior and then I continued to work with both of them. And so I went to Phil Junior's studio and we started messing around with the track and I came up with a thing and CBC loved it so they asked me to eventually to actually finish what I'd started. And so that's been on the radio for about nine years now actually. Three times a day, you hear my version of the Moe Koffman Curried Soul as the theme song, which is an honor and super cool.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

And I love hearing it when I turn on the radio, but I'm also mad because, between you and me and your listeners, the only reason that the Koffman estate agreed to it would be to retain all the publishing. So I got paid a little bit to do the work and I never saw another penny. And it's been heard, I don't know, millions of times. And what people hear isn't Moe Koffman anymore, it's a lot of my work and it's actually me playing the flute on the keyboard and I replayed everything and the beats are all new and stuff. So it's a little weird that me as the living musician whose work is heard every single day on the CBC across the country, I don't get anything from it other than the great satisfaction of knowing that I did something cool.

Leah Roseman:

So this brings to when you got involved with sampling and stuff, but actually Moe Koffman, he was a cool guy. I was looking him up. Because this was the theme I'd heard and I never really thought who was this guy, what was his background.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

Super cool. I actually have a... Somewhere in this room... I'm in my childhood bedroom, by the way, where I've been for two and a half years, and somewhere in it is a signed ticket of Moe Koffman that I went to see when I was in high school. Our high school jazz band went to Toronto for some music competition or something, and we went out to see Moe Koffman play at a bar and I still have the signed ticket. Super cool guy.

Leah Roseman:

Did he do that thing where he played two saxophones at once?

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

It was 30 years ago, I don't remember a darn thing. If I didn't have the signed ticket, I wouldn't remember that we actually went to see that.

Leah Roseman:

Had you known at the time you'd have this connection with him later on, you would've remembered it better, right?

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

Sure. There you go.

Leah Roseman:

So sampling, I imagine now there's copyright issues that didn't exist when this started.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

There's been a learning curve of how to deal with the intellectual property, the issues that arise with sampling, but I think probably by now they've got it worked out pretty well. It was in the early 90s when it became the most used method of making hip hop, by taking these old records and taking old sounds and chopping them up. The lawyers went crazy and started to really dictate how that would work. And there was a lot of famous lawsuits at that time of people that had... Before, when it was a wild west where you really could just do whatever and there was no repercussions, you just took stuff. Well, that got tied down pretty quick. And I've always avoided the whole issue just by virtue of the sounds that I sample, which are usually less well known.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

The trick with sampling is that it's all fair game if you don't get caught, and if you can change a sound enough, if you can slow it down or chop it into different pieces and flip it upside down, then you're not sampling something that's easily identified and then you're good to go. And for me, that was always the trick, that was the challenge, was to not just take a catchy fat, amazing sample and then loop it and then have a song, where's the skill in that? Actually, this guy just passed away a couple days ago, Mtume, I don't know if you heard about him, but his song, Juicy Fruit, was sampled by The Notorious B.I.G and by Puff Daddy.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

And it's one of Biggie's biggest, most famous songs, and it's really just Juicy Fruit, literally Juicy Fruit. Maybe they changed a little bit here and there. But they took that whole song, they thought, wow, that's awesome, rap on that. And that wasn't what was fun for me. What I wanted to do was take things that didn't sound super cool right off the bat and see if I could repurpose them, chop them up, chop them up so that they're unrecognizable, or also just sampling weird things that nobody would've ever heard and often things even just before copyright, things from the 1920s and things from the whatever.

Leah Roseman:

So you got into Yiddish because of sampling, I understand.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

Yeah, in a roundabout way, that's a nice way of putting it, is that I got into making hip hop and sampling and collecting old records and, like I was saying, looking for sounds that were a little bit off the beaten track and also for sounds that represented my history and where I came from a little bit. I felt weird sampling black music and taking from African American culture. I was going to participate in hip hop, which is already African American and black culture. So to find a voice within that and to find something that felt real for me meant looking for sounds that reflected my identity. I don't know if I started off quite that didactically, like I've got to do this. I think that just started coming to me during the process of becoming a hip hop producer and also just looking at hip hop, which is about representing where you're from and who you are and being real.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

You got to keep it real. And you talk about your crew. You talk about where you're from, you talk about your little corner of the city. And so who am I? This white Jewish kid in Canada. I love funk. And in fact, funk is what got me to hip hop. So I already loved the source of hip hop, but it just felt weird for me to sample James Brown and The Meters and Sly and the Family Stone and to do this other layer of cultural colonialism. It was the 90s, I didn't even know about that idea of cultural colonialism or of cultural appropriation really. It was before all that discourse started, but maybe it was starting then, and I didn't want to be a part of that.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

So I started to look for sounds that could be my story, that could tell my story in this new style of music. And so that's when I started to really fall upon Jewish music. And the Jewish music, this was because I moved to Montreal, I started to find that kind of music in the salvation armies there, people that were getting rid of their record collections. And so I started to find Jewish music and I keep doing this for Jewish music because it's an absurd idea, Jewish music, what is Jewish music? Is it a Jewish composer? Anything they write is Jewish music, maybe not. Is it something in a certain language? Is it a style? Well, it's complicated. Jews lived all over the world. They were influenced by the music of wherever they were. They influenced the music of wherever they were. They spoke in many different languages. Jews are, of course, many different races. They were in North Africa, there's Arab Jews and there's Jews that speak Spanish and Portuguese and Chinese Jews, whatever.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

So what is Jewish music? And so that began an exploration for me. My roots are Eastern European Jewish, so that's Romania, Ukraine, Russia. And so I started to get interested in that and in the language of Yiddish and I started to find Yiddish theater records. I started to find instrumental Jewish dance music, which we all know now as klezmer. I started to find cantorial music, music from the synagogue. And I started to find Hasidic music, the music of the religious 19th century Jews and their whole tradition of nigunim, which are these wordless melodies that are incredible. So I started to find those and started to find, on those records, stuff that I could sample without all that identity politics aside, these records were full of catchy, funky, loopable, cool sounds that also, as a bonus, were a little bit off the beaten track and not something I was going to get sued for and a new sound that reflected who I was that still could fit in this new hip hop paradigm.

Leah Roseman:

So in 2005, you produced, I think, in your own apartment in Montreal and sold through mail order, your album, what was it called, Socalled Seder?

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

Yeah. That was the beginning of a world where you could do things like that. I was blessed and cursed to have started in this music business at the time where there was a golden age of CDs, of selling CDs. CDs cost nothing to make. It costs of penny, it's a piece of plastic, but you could sell them for $25 each. So the music industry made a killing. Records cost a bit more physically to produce them. So this was just unbelievable. And it was before the internet, it was before everything was just free and floating through the air. So there was just this golden window of people selling music like mad. And so I saw a bit of that and I started working as a professional musician in that environment where it was oh, you could make a record and then you could sell it, and then you could make back the money that it cost to make the record. And then you could make a living as a musician. Wow. What a concept.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

And so I was part of that and I got a record deal and it was touring and it was on the radio and stuff like that. And then I saw the end of that. I saw the beginning of the internet. But what comes with that dark side of the story is also this incredible potential that came with these new technologies of someone like me in my basement able to make a record, which just hadn't really existed before. If you had a four-track, you could make something, but you'd need to go to a studio and fix it up, and then to reproduce it you'd have to get a record deal or do something. But for a guy like me to just be all by myself, make a sound, create a thing and then make a package for it, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, and then physically produce it myself, that was a brave new world. And that then led to me getting proper record contracts and making real records in studios and stuff. But that first record, it was an adventure.

Leah Roseman:

So here we are talking in January 2022, and in 2021 you produced Socalled Instrumentals, right?

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

Yes.

Leah Roseman:

So it's full circle to me, you're on your own.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

Yeah. It's trippy. That record is a compilation of things that I've done. But you're right, I did in the past couple years, in this pandemic, I was forced again to make things here, and I don't like it. I miss the studio and I miss collaboration and I miss the layers of production that I'd built, like the way that you make a song. You get an arrangement from somebody, maybe we'll write an arrangement. Then you go and record drums over here and then maybe you fly to LA and get a singer to record on it. And then you work with an amazing mixing engineer and then you work with an orchestra. There was just so many fun connections that now are all just happening over Zoom calls and it's a strange time, to say the least.

Leah Roseman:

But before this latest Omicron thing, which will be history soon, I got to hear you live.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

Amen to that.

Leah Roseman:

Di Frosh, your wonderful Yiddish songs show here at the National Arts Center. And boy, are you amazing live. I love your recordings, but you're such a great performer.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

Well, cool. Thanks for coming. I appreciate it. And in fact, that project is a full circle coming because it's me just singing with a string quartet. And I never was a singer. When I started off in the music thing, I played piano and sure I was in some musicals a bit in Ottawa growing up as a teenager, and I guess I have a good ear and I don't know how I learned to sing, but when I started to hear those old records of Yiddish songs, for some reason that's what made me want to sing. I wanted to sing those songs. And at first I was sampling these old records, using it to make hip hop and make new, funky, crazy Jewish music. Okay, that's cool.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

But then now here I am just singing songs with a string quartet. So I never saw that one coming. That's so amazing about life sometimes is that you don't really know why or what you're doing, or you think you're on a track for some reason, but then things dribble into the track and then they take you on another track and then that can become your most favorite project.

Leah Roseman:

And you're obviously a person who just says yes all the time to all kinds of opportunities.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

Yeah. Maybe, a bit. I also say no to some things.

Leah Roseman:

You have to, I'm sure.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

And you just have to do things that you can't explain, it just feels good or they just touch you magically. For instance, Kurt Weill I found a Kurt Weill record when I was 20 digging for records. I found this record of Teresa Stratas singing Kurt Vile. I'd never heard of Theresa Stratas. I'd never heard of Kurt Weill. Maybe I'd heard of The Threepenny Opera, but just random, that digging through records was such an incredible education in music. And especially then when people were really throwing out their record collections, when you had to buy a CD for $25, you maybe didn't buy every CD in the store. But if a record is 25 cents, you can buy 100 records and just check it out.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

So this Kurt Weill thing, 20 years ago, or maybe more now, I just heard this one song of Kurt Weill, actually it's called Nana's Lied. Maybe you can put it in the episode or something. You can pop it in there. And it just blew my mind. I never thought in a million years I'd be able to sing that or play it on the piano or something. It was just this incredible composition, but now I'm totally obsessed with Kurt Weill. And I've spent the last 20 years learning Kurt Weill repertoire. So that's just a weird interest that has become an obsession.

Leah Roseman:

I have to say, by the way, about the Di Frosh show, your string quartet arrangements were beautiful.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

Awesome.

Leah Roseman:

I'm a violinist and just really your string writing's so nice.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

Cool. I didn't do them all, by any means. I did a bunch of them, but I got some friends to do it, particularly this guy, Michael Winograd, who's an amazing clarinetist, but just a huge musical brain. This friend of mine, Michael DuBue, who's an awesome musician from the Hilotrons, from Ottawa, who's got his own amazing recording studio lately. And yes, and I took old arrangements like piano. Let me see, do I have something around here? No. I was just going to look. Oh yeah, maybe I do. Here you go. So I found either... Oops, can you see that? No.

Leah Roseman:

Yeah.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

Either piano charts, here's one from 1921, either piano charts, these awesome sheet music from the 20s and teens, or coral arrangements. These are some four-part harmony, but for Yiddish songs, this is from the 60s actually.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

And so just in archives there's something called the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Mass. There's the YIVO in New York City. And just there's tons of music that is just sitting there. Nobody looks at this stuff. Sure, there's some nerds and there's some choir directors and there's maybe the odd person who's interested in Yiddish song goes to these places, but mostly not, mostly people are lazy. If they want anything, they go on the internet and download a lead sheet or a sheet of lyrics, but there's all this incredible repertoire. And at first I was into singing in harmony, but then I found it was hard to get a choir together. It was hard to get four voices to learn the parts and stuff. And I thought, what if I just write this stuff out for string quartet so that whenever I want people can play it, it'll be in tune and we'll just hear it. It'll be a way to hear this stuff. So I would take these either piano parts or the arrangements, and then just rearrange them for four voices.

Leah Roseman:

So the Yiddish Book Center, have they digitized their music collection along with a lot of their Yiddish books?

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

That's a very good question. I'm not sure. To be honest, their music collection is mostly these piano charts, which are interesting and actually, they're just beautiful objects, I just love them physically, from 1927. It's in perfect shape. This thing is 90 years old. But they got a lot of their collection of sheet music from out of business sheet music companies. So a lot of what they have is stuff that didn't sell. So their collection has huge holes in it because it's basically just overstock. So it's basically a lot of copies of weird songs that nobody wanted to hear. So I'm not so sure it's that useful. It's useful because even that is a vast collection of stuff that you can explore, but they have all of that and more at other archives.

Leah Roseman:

I actually started studying Yiddish because I read Aaron Lansky's book about the... What was it called? The Man Who Saved a Million Books.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

That's it. Cool.

Leah Roseman:

And I'm...

Leah Roseman:

The man who saved a million books.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

That's it, cool.

Leah Roseman:

And I mean, I heard Yiddish as a kid. My parents spoke it so we wouldn't understand. They would speak with the older relatives, but I just always resented it because I didn't understand it. But when I read that story, it just blew me away so, yeah, I've been dabbling in Yiddish for three years now. Which is why I heard about you. Someone said, "Well, if you're studying Yiddish, there's this guy and he does ..."

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

Where are you from?

Leah Roseman:

Ottawa, actually.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

Okay. cool. Yeah, we didn't have so much Yiddish to experience in Ottawa, did we? Growing up here?

Leah Roseman:

Yeah it was with ... My parents grew up in Montreal, my mom even went to [inaudible 00:25:41], knew how read and write. But I mean, I'm older than you and it was that generation of the immigrants still being around.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

That's it.

Leah Roseman:

So yeah, when you're transcribing ... you must read Yiddish now.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

Yeah.

Leah Roseman:

People may not realize that it's written with Hebrew script because it's often written with English, but it's not the original. Yeah, I have that too.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

Keep it around. Yeah. And so yes, like you said, I mean, this is a long story we could get into it. Just the idea of Yiddish in secular Canadian culture, these people that have ... What's the word? I'm losing my word for ... assimilated. Assimilated Jews stopped speaking Yiddish, basically. I mean, it's a very long story, but when I grew up in Ottawa, well in Chelsea, Quebec, which is just north of Ottawa, we'd go into Temple Israel in, on the Ottawa side and we'd go to Hebrew school.

Leah Roseman:

Me too.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

Okay, there you go. See? Nice. So, great, so I learned how to read and read Hebrew, but not understand it because I just had to do at Bar Mitzvah. Okay, great. So you get this text and you can enunciate it, say it out loud, and you do the Bar Mitzvah thing.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

That's cool. But I never was into religion. I just always was fighting against it. And then when I found Yiddish and I found this whole situation that is written in the letters that I knew already. So it was kind of an amazing revelation to be able to now read all this material that actually can make a little bit of sense. I mean, when you're reading Hebrew, it's this ancient weird language. But Yiddish is, as we know, a mixture of old German with all the romance languages and this and that. So when you're reading something in Yiddish, like "legislatuor". Okay, that's the legislator, I'm just reading in the dictionary. So it's amazing access to a whole thing. So I've learned, in the singing of the songs, I'm learning the language.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

I've never really sat down and tried to really learn the language. I have some misgivings about that, I just feel weird to learn a language that I'll never really talk with anybody except for other nerds that have learned the language. I want to sing the songs, I want to know what I'm singing, and I mean I've been doing it for 20 years so I've certainly got a vocabulary. I can certainly understand what's going on. But I don't like to say that I really speak and write and read Yiddish. I can read it, I can write it. I don't know ... Yeah.

Leah Roseman:

So for a lot of people listening won't know, and I think it might be interesting to them, that the Hasidim are not allowed to access all the secular material in Yiddish. And religious Jews, I think, also weren't, at the beginning of the 20th century, going to Yiddish theater or films or reading novels or all the things that ... translations of all kinds of literature into Yiddish. So all that was like, they're not allowed.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

I don't know about not allowed. It's just that they're not allowed to engage with secular culture in general. So whether or not it's in Yiddish, it doesn't matter.

Leah Roseman:

Well, it matters to me because because there's this wealth of Yiddish culture that they're not accessing and it's their first language.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

Yeah but there's a wealth of Yiddish culture that we're not accessing because ... A wealth of religious Yiddish culture that we're not accessing. They don't mind. They're making their own culture, they have their own music, they have their own literature. Don't worry about it too much. They're okay. They're fine.

Leah Roseman:

You'd mentioned nigunim before, these wordless songs. And I heard your talk you did for the Yiddish Book Center last year and you had mentioned that there was a notated nigunim in archives, which I found quite interesting that someone bothered to write these down. And you also mentioned that classical musicians tended not to write down their songs or arrangements because they kept it to themselves and passed it down.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

Did I mention that? Okay. I think it was just a question of economics and stuff. They just weren't educated, necessarily, in that way. I think at a certain point, even in Hasidic history, they started to write down just even what the Rabbis had said. And that was a big move to do that. And I think it's just, at a certain point in a culture, it's just like, okay, we got to get this down somehow before we forget it all. I'd be curious to look into when they did start notating all the nigunim. It could, yeah, it could be a fairly modern idea to write them down.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

And even postwar, even, just like when they realized, oh my God, we've lost so much. We better write this down. Those books are great, you should get those books. They're called the Sefer Hanigunim, the nigunim books, and it's a two volume set put out by, I think it's Chabad-Lubavitch. And you can find it anywhere. But they're awesome. And if you get better at Yiddish, then you can read all the explanation for each nigun. Because every nigun has a story. Every nigun was composed by some famous Rabbi or ... And also the website, there's chabad.org. Do you know that website?

Leah Roseman:

I know about it, yeah.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

Okay, because it has every volume of ... They made a series of records for nigunim, for Chabad nigunim, Lubavitch nigunim, which is just one dynasty of Hasidim. But they made these records in the 50s and 60s of groups of Hasidim singing these nigunim. And all of those records have been digitized and they're all available at that website. It's just very convenient, handy way to see ... And it's basically an affiliation with the book, you can read along with that book, and you can go, okay, page whatever, and then it actually has the story of the nigun. It has the melody written out. It has the words, if there are words, because not every nigun is just without words. Yeah, that's a great resource.

Leah Roseman:

Cool.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

There's lots of resources now, online.

Leah Roseman:

Yeah. Yeah. So Tales from Odessa was a Yiddish musical theater piece that you wrote the words and music for. And it was commissioned after somebody saw your incredible puppet musical this season, right?

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

Something like that. Yeah, so the director at Segal Center, they actually supported this first musical that I wrote, which is called The Season. It's got these fuzzy puppets, I think there's one over there. Yeah, you can really see him, I'll go get him later. So I had all these puppets kicking around, someone said, "We want to do a show involving different people in the scene. So like a dancer and a this and that." I was like, "Okay, I'm going to write a musical. I'll put the puppets." I made a show, it was cool, we were supposed to just do it one night. We did it one night but I had all this music, and I'd written a musical, so I went into the studio. I recorded it, it's called The Season, check it out. And then that led to other things.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

I've gone on to do Season Two and Season Three. And hopefully I'll do Season Four next year in, or this year in Germany, but I don't believe anything is going to happen this year again. So who knows? But yes, so the director of the Segal Center said, "Hey, would you be interested in writing something for our Yiddish theater?" Which, as you know, is basically one of the, maybe two, operating Yiddish theaters in North America today. There used to be hundreds of Yiddish theaters in America and in Canada, with plays going on all the time. Can you imagine the amazing scene of Second Avenue with literally dozens of theaters open doing new shows all the time? Holy cow, what an amazing thing that we missed. So that's sad, but there are still these two Yiddish theaters, this Dora Wasserman Yiddish Theater.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

So they asked me, "What would you do if you were to do a Yiddish theater show?" And I thought about it for a while and then I realized I wanted to do something that should be a story that could be in Yiddish. If you're going to go to the trouble of doing a Yiddish theater show, and basically no one understands Yiddish except for older people or Hasidim or a couple nerds who are learning Yiddish now. It's going to be in translation. So you're going to have people watching the show in a language they don't understand. Actually this was many layers of translation, so I was like, it's got to be something where there's a reason for these people to be living and acting in Yiddish. So I'd been a little bit obsessed with Isaac Babel and his Odessa stories. I don't know if you've ... have you ever read them?

Leah Roseman:

I have not.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

Get on it. It's awesome. These are these gangster stories, Jewish gangsters in Odessa at the turn of this last century, and this incredible Robin hood figure of this guy, Benya Krik, who's the king of the Jewish gangsters. And these violent, funny, sexual, amazing stories that, to me, were kind of like Fiddler on the Roof upside down. Like Fiddler on the Roof, okay we get it, we've seen Fiddler on the Roof. Okay. And that presents a very idyllic, nostalgic, sentimental view of the shtetl of the old Jewish Eastern European world. I mean, it's based on these amazing old Sholem Aleichem Yiddish stories. But then, it was converted for Broadway to become this weird simulacra of Jewish existence in Eastern Europe. Great. How about some gritty, swearing, violent prostitutes, killing, Jewish stories? Okay. Well, these Odessa stories are that.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

And I mean, the stories themselves are ... They can't be translated onto the stage they're so ... The language of them, and I'm not reading them in the original Russian, but Isaac Babel is just this incredibly famous writer in Soviet Russia for his language and for his incredible writing. So when you're translating something, or converting something from the page to the stage, you got to throw your hands up and not ... it's not the same thing, it's different. So, that's fine. So I relaxed into that idea and that notion and I said, "Let's do this." And they said, "Cool." And so, yeah, that was an amazing passion project. I got to basically design everything and I worked with my favorite ... this amazing costume designer. And we really did research on historical dress of Odessa and of Jews in Odessa.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

And then I put together a band and I wrote music for a real village band that might have been in Odessa. So I hired, in Montreal, I hired a Romanian cimbalom player. A Bulgarian flute, nai player. A Roma/Moldovan accordionist. Because Montreal has these people living there and I'd met them in the Jewish music scene, meeting musicians from Eastern Europe. So I got them and I got Michael Winograd, who I spoke about before, to come up from New York City. He's really one of the great Jewish klezmer clarinetists today. And then, actually Pemi Paull, who was from the quartet that you saw. He was in there too. And a bass player, a drummer. And it was like a real, fake Eastern European band playing new, original songs for an old story that was written in Russian that I wrote in English and then was translated into Yiddish. And then you read it with subtitles. It's ridiculous.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

But what an opportunity. Probably once in a lifetime, I have to say, unless they ask me to do it again. But things have changed there a little bit and also just it's harder and harder to ... I mean, right now nobody's doing anything. But also, the Yiddish theater scene, it's not quite as strong as, believe it or not, as it was 10 years ago. At least there was support then, it's harder and harder to get the audience to come out. So for me, it was the once in a lifetime opportunity to work with a company, to work with a real theater company. There was 40 people on stage. And to get that kind of support and that kind of space, even just the space, they own their theater. So to rehearse, they have a big fat space to work in. That's rare. And because the cast is mostly volunteers, amateurs, well, to get 40 people dedicated to a project, that's impossible in theater and in professional worlds.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

So it was really just mind blowing to see my work presented like that. I went every single night that it was on, it was on for about three weeks. And I went, maybe I missed a couple, but I would just go and sit in the theater and watch the curtains open. And there's Odessa with this band playing these songs. Out of control. And I got to work with Miriam Hoffman, who is an amazing translator and thinker. Actually, her book is incredible. So she translated, with the help of the Dora Wasserman Yiddish Theater, they translated ... Because I wrote the lyrics and the text of the play ... Actually, no, I worked with a playwright, now that I think about it. This guy, Derek Goldman, he wrote the script. But I wrote all the songs in English and he wrote the script in English based on these Russian stories that were translated. And then she translated it into Yiddish.

Leah Roseman:

There's short clips on YouTube that look great but is there a full length thing that you have access to or people can buy?

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

I have a video tape of, not a tape, I mean I have it on my computer. But I do have the camera on a tripod showing the show. And actually I have a couple other angles, it's a little clunky to watch it like that. I hate watching my theater shows that are just filmed. It doesn't read, it's painful to watch. But it's a way to see it, for sure. But if you want to hear it, it's out as a record.

Leah Roseman:

Yeah, no, I know that. No, I was just wondering because you're saying so much work and this would be a shame if it was lost to history.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

Puppets. Puppets, too. There was this amazing ... Clea Minaker is this amazing puppeteer who is a master of shadow puppets. And so I got her to do, there was a whole layer of shadow puppetry going on in the background. Well, all the windows had screens and stuff so different stuff will be happening in the screens.

Leah Roseman:

Wow, that's great.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

It should happen again. I would love to see it happen somewhere. I'd really love to see it in Odessa. And what I'd love to see, too, is a filmed version of it. Not a filmed stage version of it, but a filmed version of it, like they do with Cats. But maybe not what they did with Cats, because that was not a success. Did you see it?

Leah Roseman:

No, but I was just ... Puppets reminded me, actually last night I watched your entire third Season, the puppet musical. I'll link it, it's accessible and, boy, it's just so charming and beautiful.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

The third one.

Leah Roseman:

Yeah.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

Okay, cool.

Leah Roseman:

It's on the web, the YouTube of the festival in Hamburg.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

Did you see the second one?

Leah Roseman:

I only saw parts of it, but the the third one, I just sat and watched the whole thing through..

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

Cool, cool, cool. See, again for me, oh, it's hard to watch. Also, that was maybe the second run. We were just getting our feet, and that show really started coming together, so to watch it and see every mistake and every slow entrance, it's painful. But, yeah, I'm glad that the film that Kiran Ahluwalia, she's pretty cool, right?

Leah Roseman:

Yeah. And the whole thing, my kids are grown up now, but we used to love going to children's theater. It's such a specialized genre. And I remember talking to one of the actors and they said, "My whole career has been doing this." And that's what amazes me about you, because you're this hip hop guy, you do all this stuff, and then what? This amazing musical theater for kids? And it works on all the levels for all the adults.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

Well, I mean, it's weird because I don't really think about doing it for kids. But then, surprise, surprise, funny, fuzzy creatures singing songs. Kids love it. So that's awesome. But I think that is a trick for people that create for kids, that they don't necessarily think down or ... When I was writing it, I wasn't thinking, "Well, this song is okay, but if I could make it easier to understand." No, you just try to write good songs. You try to write catchy melodies. And you try to write a story that is clear. I mean, obviously not every clear story is going to be appropriate for kids. And I'm sitting right now in my childhood bedroom and I'm surrounded by childhood stuff. And I think I had a pretty good childhood where ... And the things that I loved as a child, I still love them. I can sort of, in a weird way, remember the vibe of being a kid. And that probably comes out in the playfulness of the shows that I do.

Leah Roseman:

So you had one grandfather who was a magician who did some magic.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Leah Roseman:

Okay, and you do magic too?

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

Uh-huh (affirmative). I mean, yeah, it's one of my hobbies. When you see people that it's their whole lives, then I think I'm not really a magician, but it's a hobby and an interest. I mean, I was practicing yesterday. I have my set right over there, I was practicing the cups and balls. Here look, I can show you an incredible trick with this. Watch.

Leah Roseman:

You're really good. Okay, some people are listening to the podcast and they're like, what did he just do?

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

He made a yellow thing disappear. So yeah, magic. These are all hobbies and things I started it as a kid and I just kept hacking away at. And maybe got better at, for sure. At a certain point. I hope. I like to think.

Leah Roseman:

How about your musical education? You took piano lessons.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

Not much. I took piano lessons, that was it. I took piano lessons in Ottawa from a piano teacher named Gabor Finta. You ever hear of him?

Leah Roseman:

Yeah.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

Okay. So Gabor Finta taught, what was that method of ... Where kids listen and they don't learn the names of the notes and they just learn to sing things and stuff?

Leah Roseman:

You mean Orff?

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

Kodaly.

Leah Roseman:

Oh, Kodaly.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

Kodaly. So he was from the Kodai school. I don't really know what, of the method that I learned, was very Kodaly-ish. I always had a really good ear so I was a terrible reader. I just never learned how to read because I could just pick it up by ear. And so, to this day, I'm a terrible reader. I've gotten way better, but it's a struggle. I feel almost dyslexic when it comes to music reading. I just can't, it just takes forever to get through a bar. So that was, I mean as a kid taking piano lessons, forced, bribed to take it, but I had a good ear and I was musical. So I would enter competitions, I would win Kiwanis things here and there, and eventually I got to take jazz piano lessons. And I studied with this guy, Peter Brown, in town, who's still actively playing around town. And that was, for me, cooler because I could improvise and it wasn't just always classical music, which didn't really speak to me necessarily. And that was it for musical education.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

I went to McGill to study literature and philosophy and stuff like that. And I guess I'm glad I did. At the time, I didn't want to study something that I loved and just did for fun. I never thought I was going to be a musician. I was making beats at the time and so that's what I would do for fun. I would get home from school and I would make beats. So education wise, now I wish I had studied composition and harmony. And so, here I am looking at Barry Harris, who just passed away a couple months ago. This 91 year old jazz educator. And he is talking about harmony and stuff and I'm trying to understand that. And I guess I just teach myself. That's how I learned how to arranged, I just started doing it and popping notes into Sibelius and seeing how things move around. But now I do wish that I had studied. I wish it was just deeply ingrained in me so that I could just spew it out.

Leah Roseman:

If you'd spent the time back then doing that, you wouldn't have had time for all this other stuff, that's the problem, right, there's only...

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

Yeah, yeah. You're right. And you never know what you're going to get. You don't know why you're on a path or why you're not on another path. And studying literature and philosophy is ... I don't regret that. That just is good for a brain ...

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

... don't regret that. That just is good for a brain to do. And it does, and it helps... If you just study music, you can become sort of stuck in the technical endless war that it is to master an instrument or to master the theory of it, which is endless, and it's going to drive you crazy. And then you sort of forget that there's a world that you should be trying to sort of engage the music with maybe or something, or there's stories to tell that you can use music. So it's good to open your mind and study just how to think.

Leah Roseman:

Yeah. Yeah. I used to think, when I got my career established as a violinist, I would magically have all this time to learn other instruments. This was my fantasy.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

Okay.

Leah Roseman:

It's so not true, right?

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

Right.

Leah Roseman:

Just still learning to play the violin every day, it's just something I have to do. You know?

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

Right, right, right.

Leah Roseman:

So let's talk about a lot of really legendary people you've worked with, like Fred Wesley, right?

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Fred Wesley. He is... I mean, that's a good one to start with because he is really my hero and he is... I mean, he created my favorite music of all time, which is the funk of James Brown in the 1970s. He was the guy writing the horn lines and being the band leader for those sessions of the JB's, the James Brown band, in the 1970s, the early '70s. So literally, my favorite music. I mean, you can put on Pass the Peas by James Brown, and it's like there's nothing better. It just, it never got better. Sure, I love Brahms. I love Kurt Weill. I love Charlie Parker. I love Brazilian music. I love everything. But for some reason... And maybe it's just because it was what I loved when I was 15, which winds up being the music that you sort of think is the most important, and it kind of gets ingrained in your DNA.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

So Fred Wesley is a trombone player, and he... I mean, it's a long story, but basically I found out he was being active and still on tour. Basically, the drummer in this band... I was playing with David Krakauer, who is this virtuoso clarinetist who has a classical career, but is well known for his klezmer, his clarinet klezmer. He's also a teacher. He teaches at basically every famous music school in New York City. He's got a position at whatever. You name it, he's teaching. An incredible player. He really is just an amazing player.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

So already that's cool to be working with him. And I was in his band and helping him sort of produce his records and make his brand of funky, modern klezmer music. And then we were hanging out one night, and the drummer in the band said, "Yeah, my friend plays with Fred Wesley. He's in Fred Wesley's band." I was like, "Fred Wesley is still on tour? Oh my God. That's incredible." And it just sort of got me thinking like, "What if we got Fred Wesley to deal with klezmer and Jewish music? And particularly this project with David Krakauer, what if we got him together?"

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

So I suggested it, and Krakauer was all over it. And he was like, "Oh my God, this would be amazing." And through this drummer guy and the friend and then the manager and the this and that, and we had the same publisher in Europe, we got in touch with Fred Wesley and basically cold called him. "Hey, would you be interested in a project looking at this Eastern European Jewish dance music from the 19th century?" How insane is that? I bet 99% of professional, legendary musicians would not open that email, would not answer certainly, but just they wouldn't... Why would they? Fred Wesley is happily on tour. He's a world-famous legend of his style. He does not need to be doing weird things.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

But Fred Wesley is such a cool guy, and he's so into music and into collaboration that he wrote back and said, "Huh, that sounds kind of interesting. Send me something to listen to." So we sent him recordings from the 1920s of these bands, which actually do have a lot of brass and are danceable and catchy and funky and virtuoso playing and beautiful melodies. And as a great musician who has his ears open and just is looking for opportunities to explore, which is so rare, and he's also just the quintessential collaborator. He's collaborated with just... I mean, he played with Ray Charles and Count Basie and Ike and Tina Turner and Michael Jackson and whatever. I mean, he's played with great people. And as a collaborator, he brings himself and his voice to these projects, but he's able to help those projects be better, and without being like coming and just being the star. He's just got this humble collaboration vibe.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

So he said, "Wow! These are beautiful songs. This is cool. Let's meet." And so we met, and we jammed. We jammed. Like, I had my machine. He's also... I mean, as the guy who invented funk, which then became disco, which then became hip-hop basically, I mean, he's basically the godfather of hip-hop. He's been sampled to death. All that James Brown music has been sampled all over the place. He even rapped. I mean, on this record from 1972, there's a song called Brother Got to Rap or something. And James Brown says, he says, "Fred, rap." He says rap, and it's 1972. And Fred Wesley says, "I don't want nobody telling me what to do." And he talks in rhyme over the top of a beat. Well, I mean, that's rap, isn't it?

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

So, in a way, he was the inventor of this whole genre that has gone on to become a worldwide, total global phenomenon of every culture, of art, music, dance, and music and song and poetry. So Fred Wesley, he's the godfather. And when we met, he was like, "I don't really like rap. I don't like hip-hop. I don't get it." And I had my machine with me, which samples and you make loops and you make beats. And by the end of the jam, he was like, "That's pretty cool, actually." He was seeing the potential for the machine in music, that it didn't necessarily take his job away, which I think a lot of real musicians were afraid that hip-hop would do, and it did, for sure. But it was pretty cool for me to sort of bring Fred Wesley back to hip-hop or to show him that there was... the viability of this music that actually he was sort of the inventor of. So Fred Wesley, what an honor to work with him.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

And then from then, we created that band called Abraham Incorporated, which has a full brass section and Fred Wesley and David Krakauer. And that is awesome. We've had, of course, three tours now canceled since the beginning of this pandemic, trying to... Because we actually made a new record two years ago or three... I guess now it's five years ago, because it was two years before the end of the world. And then I just work with him now. We're friends. I text him, and he says, "What's up?" And for my musicals, I get him to write the overtures.

Leah Roseman:

Yep. I was going to mention that. Fantastic.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

Which is insane, to get the guy who wrote for Parliament-Funkadelic. I send him the melodies for the themes, and then he writes an overture. And he even did it for the Odessa stories musical. He wrote the overture. So Fred Wesley wrote for cimbalom and accordion and clarinet. And it's those kind of connections and weird meetings that absolutely blow my mind and make life worth living.

Leah Roseman:

Yeah. That thing about the cold call. So I bet you've done a few more of those in your career.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

Yeah. I mean, often cold calls don't really get you anywhere, to be honest. It usually helps to have some sort of in. I mean, the Fred Wesley call was cold, but it was also through the connection of the drummer and the publisher, and so someone gave him the phone. If I were to call Tom Waits and say, "Hey, Tom, do you want to do a song with me?" I'm not getting through. You know what I'm saying? Also, it might have been a different time, a bit earlier. Now with the interconnection and the internet, where everybody's on everybody's ass all the time, it's harder to make a connection that cuts through to somebody. If you're on Twitter and you're famous, well, you're getting a thousand emails a day from different people who want to do something. This was kind of a more, a pre-digital meeting of just like... It was probably through a letter in the mail or something. So things have a way of connecting better like that.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

Yeah. I can't think of other people. I guess, Kiran Ahluwalia, she's not... I mean, no offense to Kiran Ahluwalia. She's not quite on the same level as Fred Wesley. But to me, she was a cool, genius musician/artist that I thought, "Wouldn't that be interesting to get her?" She sings... As you know from last night, she's this Indian classical singer from Canada, but she lives in New York City. And that was kind of a cold call. I mean, she's Canadian, so there was a bit of a connection there. And actually, I know her accordionist, so there was a bit of a connection there. But it was basically I went to her concert in Montreal, and I said... And after the concert, I approached her and said, "Hey, Kiran, I'm thinking of this musical, and I think you'd be cool. I'm having a human. Every season has a human, and it's a bunch of puppets with one human."

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

And Fred Wesley was in one, by the way. You should watch it too. I think it's also online, Fred Wesley with the puppets. Again, what an incredible testament to his openness and bravery for him to say, "Okay." I mean, he's 77 years old. Like, do you want to be in a musical with puppets where you're on stage acting and singing with puppets? No, I don't, but for some reason, he said, "Yeah, man, that sounds cool. I'll do it." So that was amazing.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

So Kiran Ahluwalia, I just said, "Hey, would you do that?" I guess it's easier when you have a track record, and now I have a bit of a track record, and I have people that I've worked with, so I can send people... So, "Is there something I can hear?" "Okay, there is." So that helps. But I still feel like a novice and like a... I mean, it's imposter syndrome, right? That is real. I sit here every day feeling like an imposter, like 100%. Sure, I get better at things. I know I'm good at stuff, but I guess I'll never be good enough for myself to be... I mean, I'm good at stuff, but I'll never be Charlie Parker. I'll never be Kurt Weill. I'll be me, and I'll try to be the best me that can be. And part of feeling that imposter syndrome, I think, is motivating to keep working and to keep trying to get better so that maybe one day you won't feel like an imposter.

Leah Roseman:

I was just thinking, so the NFB movie about you, it's The Socalled Movie. I think it's been about 14 years now.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

Wow.

Leah Roseman:

You said almost exactly what you just said now. So I was going to ask you about that, but you just went there.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

Yeah. And 14 years later, I swear to God, I'm not... And I'm not just saying that to be, to seem like... I swear to God, I sit here frustratedly hacking away, feeling like an idiot all day. Sure, I know when I get somewhere, and I know when I... And I like things that I do, and I can listen to things. I'm not one of those people that just can't ever see or hear what they've done again. When I make something that I've worked hard at to make good and then it is good, then I'm happy. There's a song, The song I Never Got to Sing, on... I think I might have even done it... No, I didn't do it in Ottawa. But it's from the second musical, the second season, and it's with Fred Wesley. And I think it's my best song. So to recognize that for myself is good. Like, I can hear... It's called The Song-

Leah Roseman:

What is it?

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

The Song I Never Got to Sing.

Leah Roseman:

Oh, that's what it's called?

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

That's what it's called. Yeah.

Leah Roseman:

Okay.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

And it brings together all my experience and the lyrics and the melody. And it's a bit of the Jewish music, and it's working with Fred Wesley and the arrangement and the recording and the story, and it's all that. And it's finally got to one, two minutes of something that I can go, "Ah, okay, if I die now, at least there's that one song that people can hear that I don't cringe when I hear it."

Leah Roseman:

Your song... Oh, I'm trying to remember. Oh, I can't think of it now. It's that beautiful song about being who you are with kids, and there's the amazing headdresses and they're... What's the name of that song?

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

Okay. Work with What You Got.

Leah Roseman:

Yeah. That's the one.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

Okay.

Leah Roseman:

Did you design those costumes?

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

No, no, no. Nope. That was folks out in Vancouver, of all places. And a very weird video, but okay, cool. When I make a video, often... I haven't in a long time, unfortunately, just because the industry has changed. I used to be able to make a video. I'd make a record, and then the label would be like, "Okay, now make a video." That doesn't happen anymore. I've got to raise all the money myself, and I've got to... You've got to make the record yourself and pay for all that too, I guess. So you make crappy videos yourself or... I mean, I don't know.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

Anyway, but usually when I was making videos, for me, it was fun to work with someone who had ideas that I could just like... They would be free to do their thing. I made the song. Now you be creative. You bring your genius. My most sort of viral, famous thing I ever did was the head-coming-open video. And it was sort of an idea that we had together, the director, but mostly it was that amazing genius director that heard the song and was inspired. "Go to it." I didn't want to be micromanaging every choice with those kind of collaborations. And that's kind of the same with all my collaborations. I'm a control freak, and I like to see things through, but once I'm working with someone who is a genius and that's why I'm working with them, I'm going to let them be a genius to enrich everything.

Leah Roseman:

Would you speak a little bit about your Yiddish culture cruise that you did many years ago? It's such an amazing story.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

Sure. So basically, how does that one start? I mean, I'd started going to... being involved in the Yiddish revival movement. For lack of a better term, that's what it is. In the late '70s, these hippies started getting into these archives and discovering this culture that had either died out with the Holocaust and been killed off or had been assimilated in North America. People stopped speaking Yiddish. Okay. People like Henry Sapoznik and Zev Feldman started discovering this old material and talking about it, discovering old musicians even that were still around: Hot Tip, Dave Tarras, the greatest klezmer clarinetist of all time. There's an amazing video of him doing a whole concert that was presented in 1979 by these people. They'd found him. He was still alive, and they put on this concert. You can see it on YouTube. It's awesome. I mean, he's super old, but he still is just mind-blowing.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

So they started to reissue things, and then they started to have these camps and these retreats for Yiddish culture. And the first big one was really KlezKamp in New York in the Catskills. They started to invite some of the old masters that were still alive, and they started to try to sing the songs again. And then these sort of bands popped up, like the Klezmorim in California or the Coppelia in New York, and they started to play the songs again. They started to learn the style or try to sing the Yiddish songs. Of course, there was still people that knew this stuff, like your parents and like the people in the Montreal Yiddish theater. There was still people that spoke Yiddish and sang Yiddish songs. So the idea of revival is problematic because, sorry, it wasn't dead.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

And also, I mean, like you were saying, the Hasidim speak Yiddish, so the language itself is spoken by millions of people. So anyway, but in the mainstream Jewish culture, Yiddish was not present. So they started to have these festivals, and then it became sort of an international movement. And then there was new bands that were taking the music even further. The Klezmatics, they were adding rock and roll and jazz to the mix, and they were... And then I came around in the 20 whatever, the 2000s, and I was adding hip-hop. So the music was evolving and changing with the times, and these festivals were sort of at the heart of that movement. And out of those festivals came all these bands and all this activity, and records were being made. And there was sort of a golden age in the late '90s of the revival with people like The Klezmatics. And then they met with what's his name?

Leah Roseman:

Itzhak Perlman?

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

Itzhak Perlman, who I also played with, and we could talk about that too, if you want. So they had kind of a real moment there where they were doing huge concerts with Itzhak Perlman and doing klezmer, and that's great. Well, meanwhile, I was starting to be invited to these festivals because I was doing something kind of new with this mix of hip-hop. So I was invited to London Klezfest, and I was invited to Paris Klezfest, and I was invited to Los Angeles Klezfest, and then I was invited to St. Petersburg Klezfest, which was particularly interesting because it was... To me, anyway, it was interesting because it was there. It was where the culture came from sort of. I mean, that was part of the story.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

And at that festival were a lot of people from Eastern Europe, so people from former Soviet places, people from Moldova and Romania, which is where my people were from, that were still there. They were still living there and still singing Yiddish songs. So I started to meet people there, and I thought, "Wouldn't it be awesome to have a festival back in the source?" St. Petersburg isn't exactly the source. I mean, sure, it's nearby, but it's not... I was thinking more like Romania, Ukraine, and at least actually somewhere where my grandfather was from, which was near Odessa in the Ukraine. So just on a whim, I started talking to people. I was like, "Wouldn't it be awesome to have a festival in Odessa or a festival in Kishinev in Moldova or something?" People were like, "Yeah, that would be cool."

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

And then I don't know why. I guess we were on a boat. At some point, I went back to Odessa with my parents. I don't know how that started, but just we thought it would be cool to visit where the grandparents were from. So I was on tour and I said, "Okay, after my tour, I'll meet you in Odessa." So we did that. And maybe then we were on a boat, and I thought, "Imagine a cruise, like a klezmer Yiddish festival on a boat back in the source." So it was just a stupid idea. I told my parents, and for some reason... Now thinking back, I don't know how on earth this actually happened, but my parents got interested, and they got involved, and they said, "This is a cool idea. Let's do it. We'll organize it." Thinking back, it blows my mind.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

So they started... We started to really put a plan together and hire a boat. My parents are both from Winnipeg, which is where the people that didn't go to Montreal went when they came to Canada from Eastern Europe. So my parents were both from Winnipeg, where there's a big population of... What are they? This religion of kind of Christians?

Leah Roseman:

The Mennonites?

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

The Mennonites. There's a huge Mennonite community also from Ukraine. So we started looking into it, and we found that they had Mennonite culture cruises, where people would go back to the Ukraine and visit their roots. Well, we got in touch with them, and we sort of coordinated with them. And actually, my parents went on a Mennonite cruise to get the vibe. And it was a boat that went along the Dnieper River from Kiev to Odessa, and we thought, "Okay, cool. Perfect. We'll plop our klezmer cruise onto the shape that they've already created."

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

So I hired all the best klezmer people that I knew from the scene, David Krakauer and Michael Alpert, this amazing trumpet player from Philly, Susan Hoffman Watts, and her mother, Elaine Hoffman Watts. Unfortunately, in the end, they couldn't come. But Ilana Cravitz from London, who plays violin. And who else? Vanya Zhuk, this amazing guitarist from Russia. Someone from Paris, someone from London, someone from here and there, sort of an international crew. I hired this older French lady, who's an expert in Jewish dance. I hired the... or actually, not even hired. I just kind of invited, and they could come for free, Eugene Orenstein from Montreal, who's like this amazing, the head of the Jewish Studies Department at McGill. A Yiddish language professor, this guy Dovid Katz came, who is a super-famous Yiddishist who's based in Lithuania. So all those people were the staff, but then 200 people signed up to come. So we had this boat, this-

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

... to come. So we had this boat, this cruise ship, leaving from Kiev and going down the Dnieper River, with concerts every night. This guy got on the boat halfway through who lived in Dnipropetrovsk in Zaporizhzhia, and his name was Arkady Gendler. And he was actually a guy I'd met at St. Petersburg. And maybe he was one of the reasons I'd thought of the whole idea, but he was still based in this town where my grandfather was from. And he sort of became the heart and soul and spirit of the cruise. And we would do concerts. We'd stay up every night in the bar, drinking vodka and playing music and singing Yiddish songs. And then we'd get to a town, and we'd do a concert in the town. We'd go to these little towns or even big towns, Kiev and Odessa, and we'd put on a concert for the public, with local musicians.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

And that was sort of how the whole Socalled movie started because I pitched this idea to my old professor, Garry Beitel. He was my professor at McGill. I said, "You should come and make a movie about this boat cruise." And he did, but then that became a movie more about me, which is too bad because he's got tons of footage of just the boat cruise. And that was sort of what I thought the movie about. And then it turned out to be a movie about me, which is cool, but also a pain in the ass. And also, we didn't get to see enough of about the cruise. I'd love to revisit that footage one day and maybe that could be expanded into a whole situation. Yeah.

Leah Roseman:

That's a good idea.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

Okay. I'll call Garry later.

Leah Roseman:

Actually, I was wondering if you're still friends with him after all that.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

Totally. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Leah Roseman:

And in the movie, which is great, you got a chance to do some of your filmmaking. There's these little episodes that are really cool.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

Yeah. That was super fun.

Leah Roseman:

Yeah. So I think in your interview with your friend, Daniel Maté recently, online too, you had talked about-

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

Oh, wow. You're really digging deep here.

Leah Roseman:

Oh, I do research.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

Okay.

Leah Roseman:

Yeah. You'd mentioned during the pandemic that you were doing just portraits of friends was one of your ways of coping.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

Yeah. Yeah. And that came out of nowhere. I mean, whew. I never drew before. I mean, I drew cartoons as a kid. Never really seriously. I mean, I never had time to do things. So since I've been sitting here, I've started drawing. Let me see if I have some kicking around here. Yeah. Just a second.

Leah Roseman:

Sure.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

I'm attached. Yeah. I mean, I was going insane, and I'm still going insane. But in a weird way, it's like a new kind of insane. I have sort of found a Zen insanity, but no, I was going insane. Just like, what do you do? So we've had this lovely talk where you hear about all these cool things that I do. Right? And I'm doing theater, and I'm meeting cool people, and I'm doing concerts. That was fun. That was great. And that was my life.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

I was a busy, productive artist, traveling the world, doing what I like, exploring, trying new projects, chasing my dreams, as they say. It ended. It's over. It's like, it ain't happening right now. It's really not. And the first two months you're like, "Okay, this sucks. But okay," Then the next two months, then the next two months and now we're entering the third year of this thing.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

Luckily in the fall, I managed to sort of sneak out and do some concerts. That concert Ottawa was at the perfect little window of opportunity where things actually happen. And I went to Germany a couple times, actually over the summer and fall, and I did concerts. And surprise, surprise, they were really fun. Wow, I like doing that, so that's great. So I went insane, and I started to, to draw, and I'd never really drawn before. I'd never drawn seriously before.

Leah Roseman:

Wow.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

I still don't really draw seriously, but I started to draw just like-

Leah Roseman:

Okay. So some people are listening to the podcast, so these are fine pencil drawings. Are they ink as well?

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

This is the pencil kind of stuff.

Leah Roseman:

Wow.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

And look, I mean, each page is like, that represents a night of trying to not go in insane. So I would sit there and draw for six hours, I would spend on these drawings.

Leah Roseman:

That's really amazing, Josh. So these are from memory or from photos?

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

They're from photographs. Yeah, and I filled up about five ... no, maybe not five, but four. Wait, that one's not full yet. Oh, that's a new one. I just bought a fresh one. These-

Leah Roseman:

Are you going to sell these?

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

I don't know what I'm going to do. So, like all my other passions, it sort of starts off as a hobby, and then maybe it'll lead this something. I don't know. I think-

Leah Roseman:

Yeah, you're really good. Wow.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

Ceci n'est pas un NFT.

Leah Roseman:

I didn't understand that.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

You know NFTs? These NFTs? These non fungible tokens? Oh, you haven't been following the news. Then I started drawing some calligraphy. Okay.

Leah Roseman:

Beautiful.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

Fine calligraphy. Anyway, trying to not go insane. Oh, then I did a series of philosophers with food. Okay. So here was Nietzsche with ceviche, Hume with a shroom, Hegel with a bagel. Oh. And then doodling. I mean, just constant sort of these endless doodles.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

So, trying to not go insane, and it works. When I get inspired to dig into something like that, that's the best thing. Like when I can just lose myself in a project and forget, that's awesome. But that doesn't always happen. I mean, there's some days, where you don't want to do any ... You aren't inspired to doodle, to do a portrait, because also it's hard. It's like, Ugh. I know I'm going to be here for four hours doing this if I want it to be finished and good. So it's like, I don't want to do that today. And then you're depressed for another reason because you haven't done anything. And so, you know how it is.

Leah Roseman:

Yeah. I was reading a book about the flow state and how to be in it more. And there's all these many, many, feel good chemicals that are released when we're in flow state. So there's a real chemistry to, which is interesting

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

Big time. And you can't force it. It's magic. It's like, I don't know. Maybe your books have methods about how to get into it. But I have not found a fail safe way to just, okay, you're going to get in the flow state. No way. You got to just be touched by the muse somehow.

Leah Roseman:

Well, I think one thing I read about which made sense to me as a performer, is there's definitely a continuum. It's not like a switch. It's not like you're in it, or you're out of it. There's definitely sometimes you're ... Yeah. Just like I'd say continuum. But you did mention it's Itzhak Perlman, and I didn't ... Actually, I have not heard that story. Although his name was floated about your website, maybe.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

It's not the most exciting story I must say, of collaboration, just because I mean, he's kind of on a whole other level, maybe in his own mind too, as an artist and as a performer. So, there's that project of him playing Jewish music. And one year, it wasn't that long ago, Lorin Sklamberg, who is an amazing Yiddish singer and accordionist, he's the lead singer for The Klezmatics. He is normally in that project, he couldn't do it. So, Hankus Netsky, who is another legendary name in the Yiddish music world, who is the musical director of that project, he called me and said, "Can you come and do," I think it was four concerts in the states, come on tour and play with Itzhak Perlman and the band.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

Wow. Actually, I had another gig that I had to cancel that I hadn't quite confirmed yet in Germany. And I got in a lot of trouble because I said, "Yo, I have to do this. I've got to go play with Itzhak Perlman." And I did. I learned the repertoire and went and did it, but he was kind of in his own little world. I mean, kind of showed up five minutes before the gig and rolled onstage and killed it, and then rolled offstage. And that was it.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

Yes. We hung out. We ate together several times. Just playing with him was thrilling. He is clearly an insanely amazing musician. Maybe not as much now as he was at in his heyday, but boy, oh boy, can he play the fiddle. He's not a master of Jewish violin. That's a different story. And I think part of, to me, a bit of a lost opportunity is that because he's so famous and such a legend that maybe he wasn't quite open to really digging in and learning about actually playing quote unquote traditional legitimate Klezmer style Yiddish violin. But he's just such an incredible musician. That wasn't the gig. You know?

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

But my most favorite memory of that whole tour was being backstage one day before the show. And I was with Frank London, who's another legend in the scene. He's a trumpet player. And we were just jamming. And we were just sort of hanging out, playing tunes, when Itzhak Perlman came over and started jamming with us. And it was just organic and just like normal musician behavior. But that to me is the special memory that I'll take away from that experience.

Leah Roseman:

Sure. And you worked with Theodore Bikel.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Leah Roseman:

How do you say his name?

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

I think it's Bikel. Yeah. People say Bikel. Yeah. I mean, actually right this minute, I'm trying to learn some lyrics for a Bikel song. And if you can describe to your listeners, this is like chicken scratch, like trying to memorize lyrics. So I'm trying to learn a Bikel song.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

I got to work with Theodore Bikel. And now that he's gone, I literally can't believe it. The more I learn about him, the more I see what he did, the more I watch on YouTube, because I still kind of look into him now, and maybe more than I did when he was alive, and I knew him, and I worked with him. Was that guy amazing?

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

Okay. He was in The African Queen with Humphrey Bogart. He was in the original cast of The Sound of Music. He was the lead in the original cast on Broadway of The Sound of ... He was in a movie with Frank Zappa. He was on Dynasty and The Love Boat. He played Worf's father on Star Trek: The Next Generation. He was in a movie with Sidney Poitier.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

Just lately, when Sidney Poitier passed away, I was like, "Huh, I'm going to look up Sidney Poitier in Theo's autobiography." And sure enough, he's got a whole entry about Sidney Poitier. I mean, he was friends with Odetta, and friends with Frank Sinatra, and Bob Dylan, and Steven Spielberg, and Mel Brooks. And just literally Hollywood legend. And I worked with him.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

Now I cannot believe it. I kick myself for not asking him more questions and trying to hang out with him more or something. I mean, I don't know what I should have done. But luckily, I worked with him. He was in Montreal, actually, when his wife passed away. She was an incredible musician. Tamara Brooks was this amazing pianist and conductor, like a for real conductor of orchestras. And she taught conducting in the NEC and just an amazing ... Always the most heavy musician in the room whenever you were with her. And she was married to Theo and she had this amazing, just childlike love of him and his genius. And I mean, he was definitely a theatrical genius and an acting genius.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

I mean, he studied with Sir Laurence Olivier. His history is unbelievable and just getting parts in these huge productions and just in Hollywood movies. But also musically, I'm realizing more and more what a genius he was. I kind of took it for granted he was this guy with a guitar and he would sing folk songs. Oh, my God, you go back and listen to Theodore Bikel recordings. They're just astounding. And she would look at him with just this glee of ... And so to see this heavy classical musician that was with this guy with a guitar, and she would look over at the piano, just like in awe of him.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

I don't think I got it until ... I'm just starting to get it now of what an insane genius he was. So when she passed away, she was much younger than him, but she died before he did, which was super tragic and super sad for me personally, because she was kind of like an in to him.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

We got along for some reason. She really accepted me. And so, whenever I needed to do something with Theo, I would shoot her an email. I'd say, "Hey, Tamara, could we do this project?" And she'd say, "Yeah, sure. I'll talk to Theo about it." She was kind of his manager too. But for her to accept me and see what I was doing was cool, was amazing and so important for a young musician to get that kind of support.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

When I went to LA once to play a show with my like crazy hip hop, funky Jewish band, they were there. They showed up in the audience. There's Theodore Bikel in the audience. Okay. I invited him on stage. He came and sang a song which became Mein Shtetl Belz which we eventually put on record. But just that kind of support is just invaluable. An older established musicians, sure, they'll come and support something or they'll ... No, but to really make an effort to support people is ... It's amazing.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

So she passed away, and he had a show scheduled in Montreal, of a run of a theater piece that he was doing of Sholem Aleichem stories and songs. And I got a call from Theo, saying, "Hey, Tamara has died, but I have this show. Will you be the accompanist?"

Leah Roseman:

Oh, wow.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

Because she was his accompanist. And so, I mean, I didn't want to do it because I was scared. Those were very big shoes to fill, but I also wanted to do it because, like what an honor and what a fascinating gig it would be to do that. So I accepted. It was a super short turnaround too. Just like it's in a month. Rehearsals start in a month. So I started learning a repertoire. And boy. I mean, again, life is so weird.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

I can't imagine we spent three weeks rehearsing it. I can't remember that. I don't remember that, but I guess that was cool, but I literally cannot remember. Then we did the show for two or three weeks, and that is just something I'll remember as like a feeling. I don't remember the specifics of it. But just to remember going to the theater, to be backstage hanging out with Theodore Bikel, putting on ... Him getting made up in the makeup chair, and then just doing a show every day, for two or three weeks. That's awesome.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

And that's an experience that happens not as much as it should anymore. And that's what he had so much of. He's so lucky to have lived in a culture of theater and putting on a show and rehearsals and backstage. And so, I got a taste of that, and I got a taste of that with the master. And we hung out.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

During the run, he came over to my apartment two or three times. I have a shitty apartment. It's a hell hole, crappy apartment. It's not pretty. And so, to have this like 85-year-old theater legend hanging out, in this shitty basement apartment, just because he's cool, like that, listening to old records and then looking through old books together. Unbelievable. Luckily I take a lot of pictures and so those become my memory reason.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

And so, I can remember that. I have that fixed in my mind. Or just going out to eat with him, like picking him up at his hotel and going out to eat. He was voluble with stories and songs and melodies and anecdotes. Wow. And it's sad. The problem with having 90 year old friends is that they do die. They have a tendency to die. And so, he's gone. Now that I'm grown up, and I have, I have so many more questions I'd love to ask him.

Leah Roseman:

Yeah. I mean, you've played many famous halls. I've seen that feeling that you described, the memory of the feeling. Do you feel that about having been at the Apollo or like different ... Carnegie hall, different of your-

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

Yeah. I mean it's a feeling. And memory is weird, isn't it? I think in fact it's sort of what the fourth season is going to be about is ... will be about time and how time has a way of just how it has its way with you and how you can be stuck in time. But it's endless, but it's finite. And these memories ... Yeah. It's trippy. And thank goodness. On the one hand, I'm grateful for the photographs. But on the other hand, they're a curse because it sort of becomes all you remember of a certain thing, but it's better than not remembering it all. So yeah. I'm glad I took a lot of pictures along the way.

Leah Roseman:

Well, I want to thank you for your time today. It was just fascinating talking to you.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

My pleasure. I mean, I'm glad to meet you, and I hope we can hang out in real life someday.

Leah Roseman:

Yeah.

Josh Socalled Dolgin:

And I want to hear about your journey. I mean, this interview is ... It's cool for me to blab about my story and stuff, but actually, I like to just hang out and have a nice conversation with you someday.