Free Yourself (2024 Reissue)

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.

Released: September 2024
Cat: STRUT253LP
Label: Strut

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Tracklist

1. It's All Imagination
2. Functus
3. Peace Gone Away
4. Free Yourself
5. Hey You
6. People
7. Funky Consciousness