I was looking at your itinerary - you're a real working musician! You're everywhere - from the Crown Auditorium to the DuSable Museum, and that's just locally.

TERISA GRIFFIN: That's because you have to work in every genre. It's hard if you're only going to work as, say, a blues artist. I just did a gig with a 54 piece orchestra out at Millennium Park. Some people will say, "Well, she's not a jazz artist!" No, I'm not a jazz artist - I'm just an artist. It means I get to take a song that I wrote as an R&B song and hook up with a great producer like Terry and let him do what he does.

This way, I'm able to step back, do House Music with Terry, and then go play with an orchestra in Millennium Park and be a jazz artist. Artists box themselves in by limiting themselves in what they want to do.

You've got a big fanbase, but it's fragmented. There are people who only know you as a neo-soul artist, there's our people who know you in the clubs, and I'm sure a lot of people in Millennium Park were there for your name as a jazz artist, too. Which is the real side of Terisa Griffin?

TERISA GRIFFIN: That's all the real side of me. If you come to a show of mine when I'm not specifically collaborating with a certain artist, you're going to get everything. You're going to walk in and hear a Dionne Warwick song from 1979, because that's what I'm feeling at the moment. Then you'll get some neo-soul, some Motown, some Ella Fitzgerald, an upbeat remix.

Sometimes you'll get complaints. I had a lady walk up to me in the cleaners of all places and say, "I bought one of your CDs and it was all remixes. I was pissed off because I expected what I heard when I came to your show." I said, "Do you want your money back? Hold on, let's settle this now. How much did you pay for the CD?" Remember I'm in the cleaners! I pass her the money. She says, "I want to talk to you about this." I said, "Uh-uh, you don't get to talk to me about this."

I'm not going to put up with anyone that wants to put me in a box. I wouldn't want that type of person at the next show because your mind is too closed - you're not my audience. You have to allow artists to grow, and I think really, in the African-American community, we tend not to allow our artists to grow. We'll abandon you and go to the next thing, rather than sticking with you as an artist. We need to work on that. It might be across the board, but we definitely need to work that out.

TERRY HUNTER: Let me jump in because this is a good subject, I think, for the readers of 5 Magazine. Take it from me - coming up on the southside of Chicago, I've been a House Music DJ my whole life. The black community? It's stuck with classics. You create anything new today and it'll run them off the floor. We need to educate people. House Music? You can't just be into one kind of House Music! When I play at a club on the southside, they expect me to hit disco all night. The minute I play a new record, they're not going to have it.

This is a Chicago thing. You go to New York and they listen to everything. You go to LA, and Marques Wyatt has Deep - one of the craziest clubs in the world. Black, white, Chinese, Spanish people in the crowd, and they'll play classics, new stuff, stuff people have never heard before. For Chicago people, though, we're in a rut. We need to be more open-minded and get off that rocker.

I'm a producer. People say, "I know you for your House stuff." I'm in the process of doing an album with Kenny Dope, but I'm also working on a Terry Hunter album. People don't know that I came up listening to soul and hip-hop. House Music is where I come from, but I don't listen to House Music all day, every day. I'm listening to hip-hop, I'm listening to old school stuff - everything. You have a lot of people that don't know I made a hit in R&B, that I did songs with Syleena Johnson, that I did stuff with Kanye West. They're so close-minded and just want to know what Terry Hunter's doing on the House side.

Like Duke Ellington said: "If it sounds good, then it is good."

TERRY HUNTER: I had a conversation like this with Jazzy Jeff, and he said, "Understand this: there's two kinds of music. There's good music, and there's bad music." Like Terisa said - you ain't gonna box me in. I chose to play House just as a DJ because I feel I can express myself better musically through House than anything else. Production-wise, I'm all over the place. After this Mass Destruction album that me and Kenny Dope are doing, I'm coming with a Terry Hunter album. The name of that album's going to be Buffet Style. You're going to have some House, some hip-hop, some R&B, some funk, some ballads. I'm not going to give you the same BPMs for four hours, because that's not me.