V2: I cannot wait to get back to my father who is now officially two years older than dirt, to tell him he affected not only you, but the City of Chicago with that. He spent his life putting aside these great aspirations of being a world traveled musician, and has composed some 1,700 compositions that are sitting there piling up and collecting dust because he hasn't run into musicians trained enough to count in 7/4 time, 9/5 time. He's gone out and just consistently done community service, community service, community service, generation after generation after generation. Sometimes as we do in our crotchety old-age, we think that it was all for nothing. It's all, "I threw my seeds, I can't stop my seeds, and they blew away and dried up, and they're all for nothing." So I would be so happy to go back and deliver that he impacted you, and that he impacted you in a way that impacted a neighborhood and impacted a movement. I'm just so glad that you shared that with me.

Olivia Gude: People who know your father…I think a lot of people who know things know that though he himself was not internationally known as he should be, that people who've done things know that he's been this amazing inspiration to people all over the world, in terms of their work. In his color theory, as well as in his music.

V2: Yes. You should see the inside of his home. Have you been inside?

Olivia Gude: No.

V2: His biggest [inaudible] murals of color. And he's dedicated a lot of his life to the connection between color, magnetism, and the effects on the brain.

M2: What is the man's name?

V2: Phil Koran.

M2: I'm not familiar.

Olivia Gude: Very famous jazz musician.

V2: Right. The ACM just founded [inaudible].

Olivia Gude: That's really something.

M: Didn't they used to rehearse in what's now the Hyde Park Theatre?

V2: Yes.

M: I used to go way back when.

V2: We just started taking the compositions from the reel-to-reel and putting them on DAT, and transferring them onto the website. Then moving that into a new generation. He's two years older than dirt.

Olivia Gude: How old is your father, now?

V2: That's all up to urban legend, also. 78. However, his mother is still alive. And I was sitting with her at his birthday party when he said that he was 72. However, she said, "My baby is 80 years old."

Voices: [laughing]

V2: I was sitting next to my grandmother thinking…

Olivia Gude: My tendency would be to trust the mother, wouldn't you say?

V2: I would think she was there. And she would know. Yes. A couple of years back, they did an article in the Downbeat, and they said he was in his early 40s. I was born in his late 30s, and I'm in my early 40s. I was trying to figure how he pulled that off.

Olivia Gude: That's so funny. Another thing I always remember about your dad was when they had this Association of American Culture conferences and there was a [tech] conference in Chicago and he was there, they were talking about issues of artist funding. Again, this is an influential moment in my life. It kind of taught you to think and talk a certain way. He basically stands up and was like, "You know what? You need to think about that you can't help artists by making them conform to a bureaucracy that makes no sense. You know? No one says that you have to just like throw everything or give everything in the world to artists. But basically, you give us money to make work. Of course, you want to see the work. But then you make us spend all of our creative energy adding up all these receipts to show that you paid this money to do the work. And any fool would know you have to spend the money if you made the work."

Voices: [laughing]

Olivia Gude: And it was just so great. It was one of those really powerful, "Fight the bureaucracy," moments.

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