Free Yourself, a Now-Again x Vinyl Me, Please release, was the latter’s May 2019 Record of the Month.
We are also offering limited runs of four key Juju/Oneness of Juju titles with Vinyl Me, Please, including a previously unreleased album recorded at the legendary Brooklyn jazz venue The East.
All albums were lacquered by legendary engineer Bernie Grundman from the original master tapes.
Each album comes with an oversized 12″ x 12″ 12 page full color booklet detailing the story of each album and the Black Fire collective and showcasing dozens of unpublished photos. A variation of each of these albums will see public issue via Now-Again over the course of 2020.
ORDER » Oneness of Juju – Chapter Two: Nia
ORDER » Oneness of Juju – African Rhythms
ORDER » Oneness of Juju – Space Jungle Luv
ORDER » Juju – Live At The East
Washington DC’s Experience Unlimited issued their first album, Free Yourself, on the Black Fire label in 1977. Black Fire is most famous for the records issued for Spiritual Jazz heavyweights Oneness of Juju, but the label issued a series of other soul, funk and jazz albums. Free Yourself is the rarest and most sought after – and for good reason. While Experience Unlimited had started out as a high school Black Rock ensemble in the early 1970s, and while Jimi Hendrix remained a key inspiration (he’s thanked on the original album’s back cover), the ensemble mixed in bits and pieces from afro–Latin, and jazz amidst a heavy serving of from funk for their debut. They grabbed as much from major-label soul stars like Stevie Wonder and the Soul Searchers as they did from like-minded, indie D.C. groups like Brute, Aggression, T.A.A.C.K., and Public Notice, all of whom had documented their ideas in regional studios by 1977.
‘Free Yourself’ saw the band using acoustic guitar to underscore Wayne Davis’s haunting vocal harmonies on its ballad “People,” at the same time that it offered up a raucous, then-contemporary hip-hop breakbeat on “Funky Consciousness.” Overall themes of love, understanding, peace, freedom, and social awareness directly reflected the group’s evolution from their earliest basement days to bastions of D.C.’s Black community with their The House Of Peace store and community center. This is a major album within the Deep Funk canon and has withstood the test of time to be certified as classic.
Alongside this album, currently offered exclusively to Vinyl Me, Please’s subscription, we have produced limited runs of four key Spiritual Jazz titles by Oneness of Juju, including a previously unreleased live set, recorded in 1973 at the legendary Brooklyn venue The East.
Read more about Oneness of Juju here. Read more about Experience Unlimited here. And watch a short film that introduces you to the Black Fire collective, Oneness of Juju and Experience Unlimited:
Last but not least, find a video of storied engineer Bernie Grundman explain the lacquering process, and the care that went into creating these definitive vinyl reissues directly from the master tapes:
