Montreal musician and artist Josh Dolgin, aka Socalled, is the subject of the new documentary The Socalled Movie. (National Film Board)

Montreal’s Socalled is not your typical hip-hop performer. An accordion player and magician with a Vaudevillian sense of the absurd, Socalled — a.k.a. Josh Dolgin — samples his beats from the klezmer melodies of eastern European shtetls.

Socalled's ultimate goal in life is to entertain, but the Quebec-born musician hopes fans feel the depth of Yiddish culture while they are madly dancing.

Dolgin is renowned for his distinctive mash-ups, which combine klezmer and '70s funk with instrumental and vocal lines from his many collaborators, which include alt-country crooner Katie Moore, rapper C-Rayz Walz, Chilly Gonzales, funk trombonist Fred Wesley, Sophie Solomon and 94-year-old former lounge singer Irving Fields (who achieved notoriety in the 1950s with the hit Bagels and Bongos).

A fixture of the Montreal club scene for years, the 34-year-old’s fan base has become global. He has performed at the Apollo Theatre in Harlem, the Olympia in Paris and at festivals throughout Europe (he’s especially popular in France). The animated video for his single You Are Never Alone has been viewed on YouTube several million times. (In it, he removes sections of his face to reveal a strange mechanized universe under his skin.)

Now, Dolgin is the star of his own documentary, The Socalled Movie, which is premiering in Toronto on June 11. Although his ultimate goal in life is to entertain, the Chelsea, Que.-born musician hopes his fans feel the depth of Yiddish culture while they are madly dancing.

“I want people to feel joy,” he says in a telephone interview shortly before boarding a flight to attend the New York premiere of The Socalled Movie. “But there is lots of real poetry in klezmer music, because it’s folk music. It can be very heavy. You can feel the weight of history in it. It’s a wonderful combination of high and low art.”

Filmmaker Garry Beitel (Chez Schwartz) spent nearly three years following Dolgin and describes him as a cultural archeologist. “Josh unearths gems from the past and then creates a kind of world music of his own.”

Inspired by Francois Girard’s 1993 film Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould, Beitel’s portrait of Dolgin is divided into 18 vignettes. Each short film explores a different aspect of the musician’s art and personality, including his homosexuality, his obsession with funk and his commitment to working with great musicians, from classical music stars like Israeli-born cellist Matt Haimovitz or long-lost hitmakers like Fields. (Dolgin introduced 21^st-century audiences to Fields by convincing him to write a catchy theme song for YouTube, which the lounge veteran did in 15 minutes.)

The Socalled Movie also shows Dolgin mastering the sleight-of-hand tricks he incorporates into his performances and footage from Porn Pop, a Pop Montreal event he organized last year around a short film he made about '70s porn director Toby Ross. (Dolgin is a former film student.) These days, the rapper is making puppets and poring over the work of German- born stage composer Kurt Weill, best known for The Threepenny Opera (1928). “Josh follows his passions,” says Beitel.

Dolgin got turned on to klezmer music 15 years ago when he came across an album by 1920s Russian-Jewish vaudeville star Aaron Lebedeff.

“I am Jewish, but I know nothing about Yiddish culture. I thought it would be interesting to learn about this lost culture that I am connected to, rather than stealing from another culture,” says Dolgin, who now lives in Montreal’s Mile End neighborhood, which has a large Hassidic Jewish community. (Many of the melodies he draws on are Hassidic.) “I don’t care about God or the Bible. I hate religion, but I love culture and music. I realize that it is religion that produced this music.”

Socalled, right, with 94-year-old lounge pianist Irving Fields. (National Film Board)

Since then, Dolgin has recorded three albums: The Socalled Seder: A Hip Hop Haggadah (2006), Ghettoblaster (2007) and his most recent, Tweet, Tweet, which he made with the legendary Fred Wesley and klezmer clarinetist David Krakauer.

Beitel resolved to make a documentary about Dolgin three years ago, after the rapper invited him to film a cruise down the Dnieper River from Kiev to Odessa. Dolgin, whose grandfather is originally from the Ukraine, organized the boat tour to take Jewish Russian and Ukrainian Canadians back to the towns and shtetls of their homeland. Part of his plan was to introduce them to klezmer music along the way.

Dolgin designed his cruise in opposition to what he describes as “Holocaust tourism” — trips such as the March of the Living, which takes Jewish teenagers to concentration camps in Poland and then on to Israel. While March of the Living and similar excursions portray Eastern Europe as the site of Jewish suffering and Israel as a place of salvation, Dolgin wanted to use klezmer music to revive Eastern European Jewish culture and build bridges between Ukrainian Jews and non-Jews. The passengers danced, sang Yiddish folk music and jammed with musicians.

“It was an incredible experience. When we were sailing into Odessa, we were welcomed by a Ukrainian brass band which played the music we had learned on the cruise,” recalls Dolgin.

The extraordinary cruise is part of Beitel’s documentary. He chose to make 18 short films about Socalled, because multiple stories allowed him to probe Dolgin’s complex, rather maniacal personality. “Each film is very different. You watch one and you think you understand him, and then you are hit with another aspect of his identity.” The film, which is deftly edited by Dominique Sicotte, could have been shorter, but the force of Dolgin’s personality keeps us engaged.

Socalled is grateful for the exposure he’s getting, but admits he’d rather be playing the piano than boarding a plane to watch another screening of the film. “It’s amazing, but all that stuff happened two years ago. It’s in the past. It’s a wonderful record of those moments, but I’m busy, I’m trying to make things happen now.”

Dolgin is anxious to get back to making puppets – his latest obsession – recording music and working with Fields, who lives in New York. Dolgin plans to film him while he’s visiting the city. “That YouTube song was just the tip of the iceberg. He just sent me 25 original songs.”

The Socalled Movie opens in Toronto on June 11, Ottawa on June 18 and Vancouver on July 12.

Patricia Bailey is a writer and broadcaster based in Montreal.