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Cruising the islands

Swim, paddle or stroll through a great day of music
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By Darrell Jónsson
For The Prague Post
June 20th, 2007 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
Dolgin mixes traditional Klezmer with modern hip-hop, a perfect fit for a festival that runs the gamut from folk to rock.
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United Islands of Prague

When: Saturday, June 23
Where: Slovanský ostrov, Dětský ostrov, Střelecký ostrov, Mánes, Janáčkovo nábřeží, Muzeum hudby
Tickets: Admission to all the events is free
For a complete schedule, check
www.unitedislands.cz

This year’s United Islands is an ambitious project including numerous smaller venues along with the usual Slovanský and Střelecký island stages. With admission to all the shows free, anyone willing to walk, swim or canoe between the venues is bound to find something to satisfy every jazz, blues, hip-hop or folk music preference.
Headlining the Střelecký Island stage Saturday is an accordion-playing Canadian cartoonist of Czech, Ukrainian and Jewish descent who seems an unlikely candidate for dropping heavy hip-hop beats. Yet this week in France, Socalled’s track “You are Never Alone/Jewish Cowboy” is rapidly climbing the charts, and has people dancing from Odessa to Winnipeg.
The transformation from mild-mannered cartoonist to a minor prince of ethno hip-hop seems to have surprised even Socalled — aka Josh Dolgin — himself. As he told the Montreal Gazette, “I was just doing it for myself in my basement, and the next thing I know I’m playing a sold-out show in Kraków in front of 10,000 people with David Krakauer.” Since then, with a string of CD releases including Hiphopkhasene in 2003, Seder in 2005 and his 2007 Ghettoblaster, Socalled has continued to generate plenty of buzz.
Why is everyone excited about his music? As Socalled told The Prague Post, “It’s funky, it’s incredibly complicated and specific, and it developed over 1,000 years of the Jews living in Central and Eastern Europe, where it influenced and was influenced by all the musics of its neighboring cultures — Czech, Romanian, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Roma, Russian, Serbian and so on. It was lost, forgotten, assimilated, killed, hidden ... now it’s being rediscovered.”
Socalled’s CD Seder was a delightful and often humorous blend of Klezmer and down-with-it jazz and hip-hop touches. Yet on his latest, Ghettoblaster, Socalled seems ever more determined to move toward a harder boom-box sound. Helping him in this direction is not only a crew of streetwise Canadian rappers, but the folksinger and actor Theodore Bikel. Now well in his 80s, Bikel recorded dozens of folk albums in his time and performed in dignified musical works such as Tchaikovsky’s Peter and the Wolf and Schoenberg’s Survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto. His voice adds a timeless element to Socalled tracks like “Rock the Belz.”
Socalled sees nothing untoward about mixing Bikel, country-and-western choruses and hip-hop into his Klezmer stew. “Klezmer has always been about hybridization,” he says. “There is nothing pure about any kind of music; it’s always made up of many influences. The traditional Klezmer configuration used to be a violin and a cymbalom; brass instruments and clarinets were introduced later, and are now considered the ‘traditional’ style. So technology has always evolved and changed the music.
“Also, the Jews were constantly being influenced by the music of their neighbors, and I feel like my influences are different now. I love hip-hop, which is an African-American form. That was the music of my community growing up; that was the cool sound that me and my friends loved. In fact, that was way more important to me than ‘Jewish’ music. So it’s only natural that it should be a part of my musical voice.”
At United Islands, Socalled won’t be alone mixing the old with the new. Sharing the Střelecký Island stage will be Prague’s Bucinatores, now a 10-piece unit that jazzes up the brass sound with a marching brass spin that is as fun as it is ground-breaking.
On the folk music stage, Zuzana Homolová and her trio will do traditional Slovak tunes justice with their sublime folk-rock updates. Later in the day, Algeria’s Madioko and Rafika will deliver pan-Mediterranean dance-floor currency with their Berber- and Rai-inflected pop hooks. Fans of local singer-songwriter James Harries and Prague based hip-hop duo NI and Wich will also have their moments.
United Islands’ monster music program, which includes events for children, has more variety and artists than can be listed here. Check out the complete schedule online, or wander the islands to sample one of the liveliest musical selections of the summer.

Darrell Jónsson can be reached at features@praguepost.com


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