Ida Gillner is very special musician based in Sweden, and in this episode you’ll hear the powerful story of her personal journey, embracing different cultures, and also the comforting power of music.  Ida is a multi-instrumentalist and composer; her main instruments are soprano saxophone, piano and voice.  In the first part of this episode we focus on her project Shtolstse lider, her songs set to the poetry of some of Yiddish’s greatest women writers. You’ll hear about Ida’s childhood on the island of Asperö, forging her own path in different world music traditions, and  the Finnish tango group Anna Heikkinen and Längtans Kapell. We also talked about her solo album “Anna” dedicated to her sister, and how the process of writing and recording this healing music comforted her through the shock of her family’s loss. Ida’s path in music reveals a powerful story of embracing different cultures through music, and the comforting power of music. 

Josh “Socalled” Dolgin is an amazing force and I was thrilled to get this opportunity to ask him about some of his creative output, collaborations and perspectives. Josh: “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.

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.”

We start with his remix of Moe Koffman’s Curried Soul for CBC radio's daily show As It Happens, and circle around to topics including: sampling, Yiddish culture, changes in the industry from when he got his start selling CDs mail-order to touring internationally and collaborating with many musicians, including the funk legend Fred Wesley, David Krakauer, Kiran Ahulwalia, Itzhak Perlman, Theodore Bikel, writing musical theatre, puppets, art...here's a chance for all of us to get to know the creative force known as Josh "Socalled" Dolgin