The Polyversal Souls storms Lagos

The Polyversal Souls, accompanied by Guy One and rising singer Florence Adooni, will hold a Lagos concert on Tuesday, May 17, at Freedom Park Lagos, Broad Street, Lagos Island, by 7pm.
Part of a tour organised by the Goethe-Institut, the group will also go to Benin, Togo, Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire.
A statement from the German cultural institute said The Polyversal Souls is the new Berlin-based band led by Max Weissenfeldt, one of Germany’s most prolific drummers.
“The city’s vital music scene gave him the chance to bring together excellent musicians with a common passion and interest for sounds from around the world. The result was the Polyversal Souls’ debut album, Invisible Joy, a manifest of the 21st century global raw soul,” said the statement.
Weissenfeldt’s is a very interesting story of a man’s passion for music. He may have taken his drums across the world, but he’s never lost sight of his first love for soulful grooves, the starting point of a career that has led to phenomenal collaborations. Among them are his major contribution to the Grammy-winning album, Locked Down, by Dr. John and Lana Del Rey’s Ultraviolence, both produced by Weissenfeldt’s uber-fan, the Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach.
But long before that happened, his passion had propelled albums as varied as Poets of Rhythm’s Discern/Define and Whitefield Brothers Earthology. It comes as a pulse: the raw, funky beat Weissenfeldt first heard on old 45s his compatriots, including older Whitefield Brother Jan, played to him in the early 1990s, well before anyone cared for that obscure wax. This was in his parents’ basement in Munich, Germany.
Late 1960s funk and soul were the inspiration for the Poets of Rhythm, the first band in which Weissenfeldt played drums. Barely teenagers, the Poets kick-started a movement: without them – as insiders like Gabriel Roth and Eothen Alapatt claim – Amy Winehouse, Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings, Aloe Blacc and Mayer Hawthorne wouldn’t be the internationally recognised names they have become.
In the early 2000s, the Poets of Rhythm issued Discern/Define, which indicated a marked growth, and a sophisticated approach to funk music, meshed with Krautrock’s untampered experimentalism, and the Whitefield Brothers issued In The Raw, an Afro-psychedelic trip grounded by funk’s principles. Though the Poets of Rhythm would never record again, The Whitefield Brothers issued Earthology, the pinnacle of their worldly, musical explorations.
During the mid to late 2000s, Weissenfeldt was in deep study: after spending five years with Krautrock legends and “world music” pioneers, Embryo, on a 500 concert European and African bus tour.
After his Embryo period, he visited South East Asia, where he studied classical Burmese Saing Waing music. This trip was followed by a time in London, living and playing with fellow musicians, the Heliocentrics. He studied with former Sun Ra Arkestra drummer, Marvin ‘Bugalu’ Smith, in the United States before, in 2010, taking his first trip to Ghana, the deciding point to create the Philophon label. And to record all the music for his Ghanaian counterparts, Max formed a new Berlin-based band, The Polyversal Souls. The city’s vital music scene gave him the chance to bring together excellent musicians with a common passion and interest for sounds from all around the world. The result was The Polyversal Souls’ debut album, Invisible Joy – a manifest of what Max calls “21st century global raw soul”.
In 2014, The Polyversal Souls toured Ghana twice, supported by the German Federal Culture Foundation (Kulturstiftung des Bundes). Their tour included a live appearance along with their collaborating artistes, Guy One and Alogte Oho Jonas, who are both key figures of the vital music scene of North Ghana’s cultural capital, Bolgatanga. This show was also broadcast on Ghanaian national TV.
Early 2016, Max made a further visit to Ghana to produce the second The Polyversal Souls album called This is Bolga! which focuses on the various collaborations with the top artistes of Bolgatanga that came into existence over the past years: aforementioned Guy One and Alogte Oho Jonas, further gospel singers Florence Adooni and Ana’abugre, and Kologo players, Bola Anafo and Amodoo. As a spin-off, a full solo album with Alogte Oho Jonas, backed up by the fabulous Lizy Ma’aho, was realised. Further, Max produced a 7 with South Ghanaian roots reggae spearhead, Y-Bayani.
Germany’s master tenor, saxophonist and flutist, Claudio Jolowicz, joins the group to enrich the performance with his virtuoso solo work. Together with Bastian Duncker on baritone saxophone and Jason Liebert on trombone, a strongly united three-piece horn section interweaves with the solid groove machine driven by Guy One’s tight Kologo-riffs, Johannes Wehrle’s pumping keyboard bass lines and syncopated chord progressions and Max’s very own style of drumming.