An Interview with Minister Faust on Amazon

(Minister Faust's novel receiving, in his words, "The Hugo Award".)I've just posted an interview with Minister Faust on Omnivoracious, checking in with him between novels.Here's a bit I wasn't able to include on Amazon.You're a huge music junky it seems to me. What've you been listening to recently?Indeed. I’ve been loving the work of Feist; she’s from Calgary, our sister city. Although I’m disappointed her topics are so narrow (lust, love and heartbreak), her wordplay is excellent, among the best in pop music. She’s got a lovely, under-stated voice on tracks that include a soul-influence; her work sells because of its quality, not because she appears in videos as what my wife would call a “hoochy-mama.”I’m also loving the album Jali, Vol. 1 by the vast team called Mahogany Public based right here in E-Town. I performed two poems on that record with backing music, but that’s not why I like the album... even if my stuff weren’t on it, I’d be pushing this CD mix of conscious hip hop, reggae and spoken word.I’m a fan of the Senegalese vocal group Africando, which sings superb Cubano music (two-thirds of Cubans have West African ancestry; when Cubano records hit the continent in the 1940s, folks in Senegal, Congo, Angola and a few other places went crazy for the sound and made it their own).A few months ago I got a stunning album by the brilliant jazz vocalist Leon Thomas, Spirits Known and Unknown, featuring Coltrane-protégé Pharoah Sanders on the stunning elegy “Malcolm’s Gone.” Oh, and I recently acquired South African jazz singer Letta Mbulu’s CD re-release of two LPs from four decades ago: Letta Mbulu Sings/Free Soul. What a voice... no tricks, gimmicks or vocal razzle-dazzle. Just purity, an actual beautiful voice with stripped-down technique that serves her songs, not her ego.