The old story on Irie Sol is the band formed on a dare: Somebody told Jamaican singer and percussionist Junior Williams he could never get a reggae group off the ground in his newly adopted hometown of Eau Claire, Wis.
A decade and countless Midwest gigs later, the latest story on the 10-man funk/reggae/rap ensemble also sounds like a dare: It's releasing a concept album about F. Scott Fitzgerald, the Jazz Age, Harlem, Eau Claire, Dred Scott and the roots of Rastafarianism.
"Reggae traditionally is a genre that mashes up a variety of styles and influences, and this is just taking that concept a little farther," singer and trumpeter Joel Pace joked.
No joke, Irie Sol's new EP, "Dred Scott Fitzgerald," blends all the aforementioned themes into a five-chapter "novella record" centered around Fitzgerald and his characters. Next Thursday's album-release party is even timed to the late St. Paul literary icon's birthday and is taking place at a site tied to his legend: the Commodore Hotel, just off regal Summit Avenue, where Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda, lived for a couple of years after its 1920 opening. (He likely started drafting "The Great Gatsby" there.)
A fundraiser for the nonprofit organization Fitzgerald in St. Paul that will also include costumed actors and Jazz Age attire, the concert will help inaugurate the hotel's newly renovated ballroom and lobby.
The Commodore, it turns out, is also central to Irie Sol's story: Pace lives upstairs in what are now condos and often gets his band to rehearse downstairs in the building's basement, of which he noted, "The old walls are thankfully extra thick."
"It's kind of mind-blowing to think we'll be playing these songs in a room where [Fitzgerald] almost certainly danced on a regular basis," said Pace, who's also a literature professor at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire and teaches classes on Fitzgerald and hip-hop. So if ever there was a musician to write some raps about a Jazz Age fiction writer. …
Recorded at longtime Irie Sol friend Justin Vernon's April Base Studio, "Dred Scott Fitzgerald" centers on the title character from the Fitzgerald short story "Bernice Bobs Her Hair," about a shy young woman from — guess where?! — Eau Claire trying to fit in in the big city of St. Paul.
