Winner: Dred Scott Fitzgerald by Irie Sol

Less a band than a trans-geographic collective of musicians who drive you to dance with a rich blend of reggae, hip-hop, jazz, and rock, Irie Sol was already in a category by itself. Then it dropped Dred Scott Fitzgerald, an EP that fills the gaps around the classic novel The Great Gatsby with a heady brew of history, imagination, and literature that encompasses everything from Prohibition to Rastfarianism. Though the five-song disc clocks in at just 20 minutes, a literary and historical explication of the music could fill this entire magazine, so we’ll stick with the title, which itself carries enough baggage to pack Gatsby’s roadster. For starters, the title is a mash-up of two names: Dred Scott was an enslaved black man who sued to gain his freedom on the argument that living outside slave states – including in Wisconsin Territory – meant he should be emancipated; the Supreme Court ruled against him in 1857, concluding that no black person, slave or free, could be a U.S. citizen. Meanwhile, St. Paul native F. Scott Fitzgerald authored The Great Gatsby as well as a lesser-known short story, “Bernice Bobs Her Hair,” which stars a girl from Eau Claire. That girl – re-imagined by Irie Sol as a globe-trotting Jazz Age chanteuse – is a central character in the album’s narrative: In a song titled “Bernice Dreds Her Hair,” she meets legendary black nationalist Marcus Garvey, a man who inspired the Rastafari, for whom dreadlocks hold spiritual significance. Furthermore, the album cover shows a blue lion with golden eyes, an homage both to the Gatsby cover art and Rastafari symbolism of the Lion of Judah. We could go on – but suffice it to say there’s a lot packed into this disc. Oh, and the music is rich and meaningful, too!