Rosenberg: The great thing is if you bring yourself — with just a tiny bit of effort — to understand how that came to be, you'll understand huge volumes about the nature of the world in process. If you say to yourself, "Who did Indians hear the violins from?" and then you go back and look, you find out that they got the violin from the Portuguese colonists who settled the west coast of India. And then you say, "Well, what were the Portuguese doing there? And then you learn that it was a stop on the Spice Route. Through the influence of the Portuguese, the violin, which was a European instrument, made it to India and was immediately adapted to Indian culture. When you understand how cultures influence other cultures and the ramifications of commerce and trade on culture, you begin to understand how all of these things are ultimately connected to each other.

G: You've spoken before about the importance of port cities as musical juncture points. I'd like to bring that around to Chicago, which isn't a port city in a traditional sense, but is, perhaps, in a 21st sense.

R: You take a look at the Beatles who came from Liverpool, which is a port city in England. You take a look at the Argentine Tango, which swept the world back in the teens and twenties, which was the product of Buenos Aires, which was a port city. You take a look at the rise of jazz, which originated in New Orleans and then moved out across the country. You take a look at the American Broadway show, which originated in New York City, one of the great ports of the world. And you begin to understand that there's some link there — you realize a port city is a logical place for new influences to be first expressed.

So in the case of New Orleans, for instance, you have a stew of the French tradition — the tradition of the French colonialists who originally settled New Orleans — the Spanish, all the African Caribs, the slaves that came to New Orleans, all of the Mississippi river traffic that came to New Orleans, the islanders that came through, the Scotch-Irish who came bringing their musical traditions. You realize you have this incredible plethora of dynamic traditions existing simultaneously in the same place. People were open to hearing new things, so when somebody came off a boat and had a new rhythm or a new melodic conception, or somebody pulled into town with something different, it was not quite as inaccessible as it would be to a culture that was not accustomed to the "other." In port cities, the "other" was accepted.

G: You've brought up several things. You've talked about jazz in New Orleans, Broadway shows in New York — different places. In Chicago, I suppose, if there is one type of music that people tend to identify with the city, it would be blues. But there's more going on there.

R: The thing that characterizes Chicago is that it really is a "City of Neighborhoods." It's a collection of diverse ethnic groups that came here because things looked a little better here than back wherever people came from.

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