Maybe you know of drummer/composer Dave King through his work/collaborations with the Bad Plus, Craig Taborn, Julian Lage, Leo Kottke, Bill Frisell, Acoustic Deathwish, 12 Rods, or Halloween, Alaska. Maybe you know him from his YouTube comedy/instructional series Rational Funk. Or maybe you’ve tuned into his jazz show that used to air on The Current called King’s Speech.

However it is you know him (or don’t know him), King most definitely knows … Knows what? Music. Travel. Improvisation. Humor. Art. Stuff. Therefore, he makes for one hell of an interview. What better time to chat with this warm-hearted musical virtuoso than before The Bad Plus’ first ever gig at First Avenue’s Mainroom on June 10? The avant-garde four-piece, formerly a three-piece, now has the sound to fill such a rock room. We talk about the band’s transformation, his work with Julian Lage and other side projects, and we even dig into his brain about why the world could use more “melodic” drummers in popular music.

Transcript edited for length and clarity:

This is Diane here, host of The Local Show. Sitting across from me in a studio at The Current is Dave King, drummer, jazz virtuoso extraordinaire of the Bad Plus, Happy Apple, Dave King Trucking Co., Acoustic Deathwish ... Thanks for being in the studio with me.

Dave King: It's great to be here with you, Diane. It's wonderful. I'm happy. Thank you.

Yeah, pleasure. To give our listeners a little bit of context into how I know you: I first saw you  — I want to go all the way back to the first time I saw you perform. It was at a jazz club in New York City. I feel like I have street cred for being able to say that, like in 2013. It was a long time ago, but not that long ago, according to the trajectory of how long you've been playing music. But you were playing free jazz and it was with a pianist ... and it was really stripped down. 

Yeah, maybe it was the pianist Craig Taborn. Yeah, cuz I've done a lot of duo stuff with him. So I think maybe that's what it was … Did you say it was duo? 

I'm pretty sure it was just duo. It was kind of minimalistic and really free.

Yeah, I think that's what it was. Well, that's wonderful. 10 years later, still got a face for radio, you know what I mean? I've been wanting to say that for a long time. I think that's a funny thing to say.

I'm glad I gave you the opportunity to do that (laughs).

Yes, it's been 10 years now. 

I love that I can look that up now. And then the last time I saw you play was literally at a dive in Northeast, Dusty’s, with Riffin' Trio. My friend Ted Olsen on bass, Jake Hanson.

Yeah, Jake just asked me at the last minute to do it. I happened to be in town. And I was like, of course. I didn't even know that Jake — he's the guitarist of this other group I've done for a long time called Halloween, Alaska. So that's how I know Jake for a long time. And I didn't know that he ever played jazz standards or anything like that. And turned out he's like, “oh, yeah, I do.” And I've known him for 15 years. I've never heard him play anything like that. And he sounded so good. It was really fun.

Yeah, I love [his playing].

He's a great musician. 

I also want to make note of how there were these two fans in the audience that were quoting your Rational Funk YouTube series. And they whispered to themselves, I don't think anyone knows what we're talking about. And I'm like, “Oh, but I do.”

(Laughs) Niche audience.

It is. Well, let's start with, mainly I wanted to bring you in because the Bad Plus has a big show coming up at First Avenue with Marc Ribot and Alan Sparhawk. I think there's a lot we can branch off into that. But tell me about the show you have planned.

Well, it's really fun for us after we've been together, the Bad Plus, in a couple different incarnations for 22 years now. And so to play First Avenue Mainroom for the first time, a lot of people kind of erroneously think of the Bad Plus as a Minneapolis band. But it's actually a New York-based band. I just happen to live here. And Reid, one of the founding members, grew up here. But he hasn't actually been here since high school. So it's a big deal to play at First Ave. 

We used to be a piano trio, as many people know, for the bulk of the band's life. But over the last two years, we switched the band completely to a quartet with no piano. We actually, Reid and I, wanted to experiment with a larger quartet version. And then through those talks, it became apparent that we've always sort of been this engine behind everything with the group — not to minimize anyone else's input. But we kind of just decided to name it to claim it and say, well, you know what, the Bad Plus is what we say it is. And so we brought in two of these fantastic musicians who are very known in the world of improvising musicians named Ben Monder and Chris Speed. I have played with Chris Speed a lot in different projects over the years. But Ben is also an old friend, we work together. 

So a reason why I'm doing a long answer is because this sort of guitar, saxophone, bass, drum — that sort of all a sudden opened the door for these non-piano-centric rooms. Which we still do our Dakota year-end four-night thing we've done for 22 years essentially. So that has that jazz club energy that the band can do. But with this new lineup, even though we've always ventured into other types of rooms and theaters and rock clubs here and there. This version of the band really feels at home in some of these larger rooms. We just did Webster Hall in New York. Went very well. So we're doing a lot of combining of small, multiple-night jazz clubs, or a theater, or a rock club. 

So to do these shows with Marc Ribot, who we've been doing a few already with him. And he's such a great guy. And we're very compatible energy.

Marc Ribot, if you don't know, plays guitar for Tom Waits, or in his lifetime has. Who else am I thinking of?

Elvis Costello, among so many others.

Oh yeah, John Zorn.

The Lounge Lizards and John Lurie. All these other people. And so he's, like I said, a great compatible energy and great guy. So we've actually done about four or five double bills already. And so this tour we're doing in June, a lot of the shows are with Marc and his group Ceramic Dog. 

And then we thought a fun thing to do for the Twin Cities show, because of our Minneapolis sort of beginnings, roots, as far as Reid and I, we're huge fans — and who isn't a big fan — of Low. And I know Alan a little bit ... to get in touch with him, and of course, seeing where he was at as far as being able to play and doing what he wanted to do musically. Years ago, he played an opening set for Halloween, Alaska. And he was solo, and he was using electronics. It was really strong. And I just thought, man, wouldn't it be great to see if he would like to jump back in the fray and do some playing and resurrect that thing? And we got in touch with him. He was totally like, yeah, let's do that. And so everyone was really excited about that little added bonus. So he's gonna do a short set to start the show. And then Marc will go on, and then we'll go on.

Yeah, Al has been doing a lot of different projects around town, Derecho ... 

He is just a fantastic musician, and a really great guy. So it really made a lot of sense to us. And The Bad Plus guys are all Low fans. And since the other guys don't have the biggest of the Twin Cities, or at least Minnesota because it's a Duluth thing. But they forget sometimes that Low is from here and from Minnesota, and their oeuvre consists of this just hugely tied to this place. And so we just thought that was extra special. And we're so glad that he decided to do it with us.

I hear what you mean about how your music will fit into a big venue like First Avenue, because there's definitely some of that jazz sound that y'all are known for. But then, especially with Ben Monder on guitar. 

Exactly. 

Wow.

Yeah, it turns into a whole other game, which we've been doing now for a few years. We made a record, and then we've been going in and doing some of these First Avenue-style rooms. And again, First Ave is an amazing club, but we thought about doing it years ago — I think that they asked us a couple of times ... Because sometimes we would come to town and play the Guthrie or Ted Mann Theater we did years ago at the University of Minnesota. So it's like we would sometimes balance our year-end thing with, halfway through the year, play another Twin Cities show. So we always thought — does the piano really speak in some of these rooms? That's tough. It's tough to get a piano to project in a room of 1,500 seats, unless it's a very quiet theater. And so we just thought now is the time, and they were so sweet to provide us the room for the show.

Tell me more about this latest record that you put out. You just released a new single called "Electric Face." Go deeper more into this new sound that you're building that you still said is very much rooted in the Bad Plus, which is obviously you and Reid.

So when the pandemic was kind of going on, and everyone obviously locked down, and for a lot of musicians that their life was touring as far as your sort of output artistically being on the road, you're obviously having all of that shut down. You get into these situations where you start planning, well, when things hopefully get back to normal, maybe we should come out with some new energy in doing whatever. 

And the pianist of the Bad Plus is a brilliant pianist named Orrin Evans, who replaced Ethan Iverson in 2018. And he was a great old friend of ours, and he's a pianist from Philadelphia. He was known for many years for his own projects. And we had made two records, and then everything got shut down. And we were doing quite well. And Orrin was a leader in a lot of other projects that he was doing, including a big band and all these very things that take time. And when you're in the Bad Plus, it's a commitment. It's a band that does a lot of touring, and as much as I do all these other things, it's really the main thing that I dedicate a priority to. And it doesn't mean these other things that I've done are not, of course, artistically important. But when it comes to scheduling things, you know yourself as a musician, you really need to have that commitment in order to make things go. 

And so over talks with Orrin, we were talking about maybe expanding to a quartet when we came out of the pandemic, maybe adding a guitar player, maybe adding a horn player. And over the course of those talks, which were very, very friendly … it became more and more apparent that coming out I think Orrin thought maybe it would be best if Reid and I took that direction with another thing. And he could maybe go back to focusing on his music, his leading, I should say, because he brought in music to the Bad Plus and everything. And since Reid and I have always been the main composers of the Bad Plus, if you look at all our records over the years, it doesn't mean that Ethan didn't write some incredible music, which he did. But if you line up all the amount of music, the composers of the bulk of the music, it was Reid and I. So we just started to say, hey, what if that's how we should think about this from now on is, in a way, it's still a band. It's still the Bad Plus. 

But the reason why it still kind of sounds like our vibe is that element of composition. We've always thought of ourselves as a song band, like an avant-garde song band, and less of a band with long jazz soloing over these forms. It's more like we would come from that earlier era of the music, where you'd have five-minute tunes, four-minute songs. They weren't these exploratory 15, 16-minute tunes you'd hear from the '60s on, which, of course, I'm a huge fan of. And we delve in there every now and again. But for the most part, we come from that era of song, as you know, Thelonius Monk or something where you identify it with a composer immediately. There aren't many Thelonious Monk tunes, for instance, that are over five, six minutes long. They're very memorable. You hear the statement. There's some soloing. And then the statement is out, you go out. And we've been basically continuing that with these guys, Ben and Chris. 

We made a record, and I have to say it was quite difficult to reframe the band. We took many, many months of working on the music and rehearsing like anyone would. But we had to pull off that magic trick … We were saying to ourselves, it clearly isn't the Bad Plus, but we call it the Bad Plus. And of course, it is the Bad Plus. But it isn't (laughs). It's obvious when you have a band for 22 years that's a piano trio, and all of a sudden you don't even have a piano anymore and you call it the Bad Plus — that is a leap. But if you have the main composers of the band, the founding members of the band, sort of artistic directors of the band, you have that chip to play, really. It's like, well, it is though. And we bring in these guys that know what we're all about, and they're old friends, and they're brilliant musicians. 

And so then we made this record based on just my music and Reid's music knowing that getting further in a year or two of touring and releasing the album, that Ben and Chris would bring in music, and there it would be a more even trajectory of composition as well, which now is happening. So our next record, which we plan on making in June, after these shows, will feature music from every member again. So again, this sort of strength of having multiple composers in a band, the sort of idea of songwriting within the structure of jazz and avant-garde music. And that's kind of what we feel like we've pulled off. We've been on the road for the last year-and-a-half touring on this album, which is simply called The Bad Plus. … It’s got some undertones of like — it is what we say it is.

Absolutely. I love Reid's bass playing. His lines are so defined, and have this certain personality to them on its own. And the way that the two of you engage musically and artistically is really something. 

Yeah, thank you. Yeah, he's brilliant.

Tell me more about your relationship with him. What is in particular about Reid that you feel like you have this certain type of synergy?

I love talking about this, because sometimes people don't know. It's not common knowledge, but the people that know the band know that Reid and I have actually been playing together since we were teenagers, since we were like 15 years old. 

Right here in Minnesota?

Yes, we grew up near each other. Actually, the great pianist Craig Taborn is also, our generation, from here. We all went to different high schools, but we knew each other through sort of youth band things or doing whatever, where we found each other very early in this sort of development of being so into improvised music, but also being into rock music, pop music, being into early hip-hop, R&B, punk music. So being from a city like Minneapolis, where there was so much happening, especially all-ages shows and things like that, but you could also go to the Walker and hear the avant-garde musicians. You go to the Dakota and hear straight-ahead jazz musicians or whatever. We ended up developing the same language very early. We found each other very early in these crucial years. And so the thing that we have to go back to all the time is that length of the friendship, but also that really powerful thing that the stuff that you really love and are inspired by, is that stuff from that era of your life. You can't really ever escape — you can dig new music all you want. But then somebody puts a record on that hit you when you were 14 ...

I have so much nostalgia for stuff I was listening to when I was a teenager.

Exactly. It's incredible. And so what's hilarious is we'll be in the car, the Sprinter on the road. And Chris and Ben are sitting there, and we used to do this with Ethan. And of course, people are playing music. And all of a sudden, they start to realize that anything that comes on between Reid and I, it's always this thing where he and I are just locked in on how much it did to us. 

And Reid is obviously, you mentioned, a great bass player, but he's truly one of the great composers in the world of modern jazz music. He's really known as one of these really unique and brilliant composers. And I've always been a composer as well. So to have the strength of two different views as composers, our music is different. It's very compatible, but it is very different. And it's almost like Fleetwood Mac had how many singers, you know, so you have three lead singers. All of a sudden you have three bands in one essentially. So I use that example sometimes when you have multiple composers in a band and every piece is treated equally. That's the democratic thing of the band. So the composer kind of has the right of way, but everyone gets to contribute to their thing to the music.

Yeah, it might be a sonic element. An added embellishment. 

Yeah, letting Ben Monder, for instance, loose on your music is like, oh, man. And I just every night is like, how's that going to evolve? And Chris Speed is just one of the great tenor saxophonists in the world. Unique and arty. He's like the arty tenor player. He's not the blowhard. That's what's so fun about him ...

I know exactly what you mean. I went to music school. The …

The boss tenor.

(Laughs)

We have the anti-Boss tenor. And everybody knows what I'm talking about if they've ever seen him or heard him. 

I was reading an old interview where you talked about how you love idiosyncratic musicians. And I want to say, when I was a kid, how much music meant to me and how much I still love it and go crazy for it. But also, (I understand) the consumption of many different types of music also helps you build this repertoire in your brain to be able to compose music. And you wanted to see more rock bands with drummers with personality. And I agree that a great drummer in a rock band can especially bolster and ground really great music. Tell me more of your thoughts on that.

Well, that is an important one ... because I do love playing rock music. For me, it's like, if you're not into all kinds of music, it's almost like saying you don't like all kinds of food. It's a really strange perspective when people are like, well, I just dig punk, or I'm only into classical music.

Greg Norton, bassist of Hüsker Dü, is a very good friend of mine. And he's an American punk icon. And the first records he was talking to me about when we became friends were prog rock records. You have this idea of what a punk musician is like — and he's also listening to Japanese contemporary classical music, and speaking about it very articulately. Not just like, “Oh, I checked that one piece out that Spotify told me to listen to because I liked whatever.” And so, in that way, that sort of omnivore thing — and I think that bringing it back around to drumming personalities in rock music. You have the sort of steady fulcrum position of the drums in a rock band. But as we all know, if you start to cite rock music or any other kind of music where the drummer had a very distinct, very personal style — that immediately stands out within that group. 

For instance, what comes to mind immediately, for me, are the very obvious things like the Police. So if you listen to a Police record, there is no possible way that music could be that way without Stewart Copeland. That's an ingredient that is in the DNA of why that music had what it had. Even if Sting's writing is whatever, if you go back and listen to those records, and listen to not only how brilliant Stewart Copeland is, but how personal. How no one really played drums like that in pop music before. And the hybrid nature of — he was raised all over the world, grew up in Beirut. I guess his father was a CIA officer, believe it or not.

Oh, wow.

Yeah, it's an odd story. But he traveled around the Middle East. And they lived in London.

So he's experienced a whole lot of life.

Yeah, he did. And then when London was dealing with a punk thing in the mid-’70s meets sort of their obsession with reggae and Afro-Caribbean music and things like that. Those scenes were in London a lot at the time. And you start to see the hybrid that started to appear within his life experience. Again, going back, and I can cite so many groups where you have this drum personality, and it's not just this thing … But the landscape of really personal, rhythmic approaches within pop music, rock music, and live hip-hop groups or things like that.

The Roots, yup.

Yeah, Questlove has a very personal way of playing the drums, for instance. And it's been emulated now by so many people, but there are these people that change the game that way. And then there are all these people that emulate what they're doing. But I think there should be more encouragement to that idea of the drums being able to be more melodic, more experimental, without being necessarily busier. It's not like you hear a Police tune and go, “Gosh, I really wish Stewart Copeland would stop playing all that cool stuff. I mean, this is really not helping.” It's like there's a tempered way to express yourself within that music. Everyone knows you have to be a little bit more, I suppose, minimalistically palatable than a jazz musician of some kind. But there's still a ton of room in those worlds. And it's a challenge to people to be more yourself instead of how many more dutiful positions can be filled. 

This leads me — I keep thinking about an episode of television I watched last night. It was Ted Lasso. I don't know if you've seen that show yet.

I haven't. I've heard a lot about it though. The premise sounds amazing. 

It's really great. I think it's very heartwarming. It's about a soccer team. And it just has all these weird tangents about relationship stuff between the players and between the coaches. And then they'll host press conferences and (in one episode) the manager of the team had to be called into a press conference because one of the coaches was having an argument with one of the reporters that Joe Walsh was a better player than Jimmy Page. 

(Laughs)

And they were screaming at each other. It was so convincing — the artistry versus the speed or the blah, blah, blah. And then there was the whole Meg White debate ... a (real) journalist said, “The tragedy of The White Stripes is how great they would have been with a half-decent drummer. I'm sorry, Meg White was terrible. And no band is better for having shit percussion.” I don't know what your feelings are about Meg White as a drummer, but I'm curious to hear you talk a little bit about this kind of discussion about —

Yeah, I do have an opinion about that. As someone who, I can't claim to have been a fan of White Stripes in general. So I wouldn't say that Meg White is a problem. I think that she fit quite well. I think that she was there for a very specific aesthetic that Jack White, being sort of the de facto leader of the of the group — for what he was attempting to do, that he needed the sort of rough-hewn, kind of unprofessional thing that he viewed as sort of a part of a certain folk element that they were trying to bring to the music being from Detroit … But he was utilizing a lot of these sort of early blues references, and these drum and fife references, and all these things where you're dealing with a language that could be viewed as less refined, even though there were incredibly refined decisions being made in all of that original music and all early blues. And I disagree very strongly that things were based on "unprofessional," unlearned things. I think these were exact languages that people were dealing with, including odd bar things, more storytelling-based bar lengths, and drummers needing to deal with that, and need to be able to play like that. 

So it's a two-fold thing with the White Stripes with me. Because I actually thought about this, is that, whereas I feel that she served a great purpose for what they were trying to do. I don't know this for a fact. But I think there's a reason why maybe she hasn't gone on to do other things because it really made the most sense in that environment … Meg White obviously had some limitations as a musician that aided in the music, and in that way that worked. And that worked for them like gangbusters. That was a big band, right. It works. And it works when you hear it.

You are involved in a lot of different projects. And one I feel like you've most recently been involved in is with Julian Lage.

Just got home from Europe yesterday. So I was with him a lot lately.

Right before, preparing for my interview, I watched — I think y'all were playing some bar gig, and I was just losing my mind. Julian Lage performed at the Grammys when he was 12. And then three years later, was teaching Ivy Leaguers at Stanford. That's insane. 

He's a special guitar player, special musician. 

Tell me more about playing with him.

It was a very funny moment of meeting him. The Bad Plus was playing a festival in Australia. We were in Sydney or Melbourne ... And this was maybe 10 years ago, or eight or nine years ago. And I was standing in the lobby waiting for the transport to take us to the theater. And Julian was there with another project. I think he was playing with Charles Lloyd, saxophonist. And he came up to me in the lobby, and I admittedly didn't know him by sight. And he came up and he said, my name is Julian Lage, and he was so friendly. And I said, well yeah, I know who you are. You're a guitar player. And he was 25 at the time, or 23, or 24. 

But everyone knows that knows him, knows that he was this legitimate sort of child prodigy. There's a film that you can watch on YouTube and other places called "Jules at (8)," where it's a French filmmaker that followed him around when he was (8) years old. And he was already playing with Santana, and all these other people when he was nine. So I met him and he was saying, “Man, I'm a big Bad Plus fan. And I hope we can play together someday.” And a lot of people say, well, I hope we can play together. But he was very effusive and really nice. He's a really great guy. And I went out to the transport, I was like, I think I just met that child prodigy kid. He's like, 24 now or whatever. And the guys are like, oh, yeah, okay, Julian. But we hadn't really known of his music. He had made a few records on his own. 

A few years later, he contacted me again, I can't remember how, and he said, listen, I have a multiple-night thing in New York. I wanted to know if you wanted to do a few nights of this four or five-night thing at The Stone, John Zorn's club. And he said, maybe we could do two different configurations. And I said, oh totally. I'd love to. I had the schedule to be able to do it. And we really hit it off musically, right away.

We just got back from this three-week European run where we're working on a lot of the new music. So I've been touring with Julian quite a bit more than that since things opened up. I've been trying to balance Bad Plus stuff with Julian stuff. But he's one of my main projects, working with Julian. And he's so brilliant and so sweet. And he's one of the just great musicians and great guys. He's just like one of those good energy, kind people that's out there doing his thing. And he's one of the heaviest musicians I've ever played with in my entire thing. He's quite astonishing. So if you get the chance to check those records out, and to see him doing anything is astonishing.

I've seen him play, because he also has dabbled with Americana stuff.

Absolutely. It's tinged in his work.

Yeah, there's a certain playfulness, yet so rhythmically complex. I think that's why it's so cool to hear both of you (together), because the weird cadences that you just never expect, and all the sudden it comes back perfectly on time. That's what it's like when I've seen you perform — I literally feel like my head is exploding. My brains are just spilling everywhere (laughs).

Well, it goes without saying — that makes two of us. Just trying to keep it together (laughs). But yeah, working with him is a dream. It's wonderful. And he's very intuitive, very telepathic. He's easy. Listens. He's been at it for so long. I tell this funny story, I was talking to him once — we've become quite close over the last several years. He used to play with this very legendary jazz vibraphonist named Gary Burton. And I said, when were you playing with Gary Burton? It was a band with bassist Scott Colley, great bass player who I have gotten a chance to play quite a bit with over the last few years. And this legendary drummer from generations before, Weather Report's drummer Peter Erskine. And he was in the group and I was saying, how old were you when you were in that Gary Burton band? And I'm thinking he's gonna say like, 21 or 22. I knew he was very young doing these things. And he looked at me very earnestly. He's extremely earnest. And he looks at me, he's just like, "Oh, my gosh, geez. Um well, I think I started when I was 11." And my brain just can't. 

It's one thing to riff on Instagram. It's another thing to be hanging with very renowned, high-level adult improvising career musicians and be 11 years old, and be able to hang in that environment. That is like Bach level. That's once in very few generations where you see somebody that has a voice enough, not just someone that's sort of emulating somebody. And you're right, his voice is very unique. It combines real blues elements that are very learned like a student of the music, but also these bebop elements, contemporary classical elements, Nashville '60s vibes. He's very unique that way. He combines that in a very effortless, sort of alchemy of all those styles. And not a lot of jazz guitarists think like Julian does. They're not as bluesy, they're not as equally adept at a sort of a Nashville picking style. And then he filters out through this sort of modern jazz lens and avant garde lenses of things very effortlessly. It's very impressive actually.

You used to have a show on The Current.

I did. 

We got to bring it up because you're being interviewed by The Current. 

Yep, I'm back (laughs).

Back in Action! Tell me about what that experience was like, because The Current doesn't play a lot of jazz. We do here and there. 

No, yeah, usually it would be stuff I did, which was so nice of you guys ... David Safar approached me years ago now, asked if I would be interested in putting together a specialty show that I could kind of control and just send in ... If I had an engineering scenario where I would be able to — either that or they would put me up here. But he knew because of my touring, I really couldn't come in weekly and do a show. And I started thinking about it. I said that idea really appeals to me. I can, like you, design a playlist, design a program that involves me highlighting a lot of musicians that you'd never usually hear on the radio, number one; but also do some sort of classic Sunday education hour of, like, a biography of each. I would feature different people and a large swath of their work over the course of their careers. And every now and again, we do these things just called the Diamond Collection, where we do like a DJ set of a bunch of different things that we love, or that I loved. 

Joe Johnson, a great engineer, actually helped me create the Rational Funk stuff. He engineered the show in his basement. And then this lasted for five years, every Sunday night, except for a few where they had to do a couple of reruns that we just couldn't get a show in on time or whatever. But they stuck with it. And they just kept re-upping it. 

And I just thought it was so fun that they did that, because I think it represented not only a voice of music that you don't hear often in a station like this, or a station anywhere. Because, of course, some jazz stations even program more straight-ahead jazz music or whatever. We were playing stuff from every school, including some very long compositions and deeply entrenched avant-garde pieces. We were playing Cecil Taylor records and Anthony Braxton — all this stuff that you would never really ever hear on the radio. And for that I really saluted The Current, and we had a great time.

And then when the pandemic kind of made things more difficult, it just sort of became a thing where there was a shift in what things needed to be over here ... we had a five-year run, and I was like, “Man, I couldn't believe it.” They were saying to me, like, “Oh, sorry about that.” I was like, “Man, I can't believe I was allowed to do that as long as I did it.” I mean, I was nothing but thankful. And it was like, time to have it be something else. But I enjoyed every second of it. It was a blast.

And it was named The King's Speech. Just like the Colin Firth movie. Also a great movie. 

Yeah, it's a great movie. And yeah, we had fun with the naming of it. And I would hear from people all the time saying how much they loved it. I know it's still sort of in syndication on the website here. There are a bunch of them up, I guess. So I hear from people all the time — my peers that I got to highlight. I would be in New York or doing whatever and someone would say, Man, I heard the show you did on me. And I did shows on Mary Halvorson, Michael Formanek, Tyshawn Sorey, many musicians that wouldn't have necessarily a radio station of this size playing their music. And it became a really fun thing to tell people, you're gonna be — I did one on Ben Monder. 

Incredible. And then also, you had this YouTube television show, comedy, called Rational Funk. Oh, my gosh, I've watched almost every episode. It's been a while, but it's hilarious. Any chance you'll do something like that again?

You know, not right now. I don't know. I mean, it's out there in infamy. We filmed it in 2015. And it lasted until May 2016. So there were 62 episodes originally. And we just put them out every Tuesday for free on a YouTube channel. It was just sort of almost like, not to sound pretentious, but sort of like a contemporary art piece. Just leave this here and see how many people find it in the music world. And of course, unbelievably, we could be in Eastern Europe and people saying the sayings. Or you could be in Sao Paulo, and you'll hear somebody say, man, you know, Rational Funk, whatever. So it reached a lot of musicians in a really grassroots way. Nothing blew up, you know, millions of views of a cat doing whatever. We always viewed it as something you'd stumble on in the woods and be like, what is this? We wanted it to be like, no one promoted it. It was just a thing that we left out there. 

Just a little treasure that you can find. 

It's a little fun thing for the musicians because there were so many truths in it as well. That was one of the fun things, is to be subversive with the silliness. Of course, a very abstract, very avant-garde version of an instructional thing. And so it had all of these things that you would never see. It's not a parody of an instructional video. It's its own entity. Humbly, I will state there's nothing like it, in my opinion.

Agreed.

Where you have this nonstop beeped-out swearing, words going along the bottom, abstract phrases. 

Weird cutting.

Yeah, insane editing. It's very unique. And then the musical stuff is actually, underneath this sort of strange persona, is a lot of actual valuable – sort of the way The Onion is actually kind of true. It's that kind of energy. And so we always would hear like, oh, but when you get in there, there's all these nuggets of real stuff that musicians know, and that people can latch onto if you're not a musician. We had a great time. 

And then during the beginnings of the pandemic, you were at home. And we've felt like it's such a difficult time for musicians and difficult time for everyone creatively, we thought we would do a redux of 14 episodes. And it came back at the beginning of the pandemic around June, maybe, 2020. And we just rolled those for 14 weeks. And we asked for donations. And we ended up getting some nice donations to some political things that we were interested in donating to and, at that time, a sort of new awareness of things that needed to be addressed through the arts communities and everything. Saying, if you donate just beyond our production costs, we're just going to give the bread away to these things. And it was just a nice project again, to just volley something back out to the fans of the show. And sure enough, great fans of the show donated money to this show. And we ended up being able to make a couple of really nice contributions to some things, including an urban farming initiative, an awareness of police conduct initiatives, and all these other things. It turned out to be really cool in the sort of Rational Funk community in the world, which is small and mighty. We found it was just a nice little sort of chef's kiss that we dropped those again, and then we buried it again. So never say never, but it's not in the cards right now.

Well, I love it. It's like another form of using your creativity.

That's exactly was it is.

When you're an artist or a musician, play music, do different things with how you have a creative mind, and just go with it. And I love it.

I couldn't say it better. I always think of it as just another extension of using your creativity. That's all.

Fun question to end this interview. You're someone who's literally toured the entire globe. Name some of your favorite spots to play.

Oh, man. Some of my favorite places to play over the years. Well, it's always nice to be in -- mainland Europe has a great appreciation of improvised music. And of course Europe has many of their own burgeoning scenes in jazz and creative music. We just got back from being in Paris and being in places like Berlin. And those are always wonderful. Copenhagen. Oslo. But also, I've always enjoyed going to Argentina. Bueno Aires has been fantastic for us, and Tokyo. I appreciate being invited anywhere to do anything. So you want to say everything. But when I see certain places on an itinerary, Florence, it's like, wow. You know that the audiences in Italy are very hearty, and you're going to eat a very good meals. You gotta try and get out of there without putting on a bunch of weight. And, but you know, being in Barcelona, then smaller places, and anywhere in the states and everything. You're just happy to be anywhere. I love playing in Ireland, for instance. I found that Irish audiences are extremely soulful. 

And you find those pockets of people that you're like, wow, the world has so many amazing people. And it maybe sounds a little cliche, but you do see the connections that people are people. We used to have this tune in the bad plus called "The People of the World Are United." And I love when we used to play this tune. It's just such a great statement. Because it's like, you get out there and you see it, and it makes your perspective kind of realize there's so many pockets of so many great people doing really beautiful things on the earth. That's probably why there still is a planet at this point. It's all this other frequency that people are pumping things out on that maybe is a little under the radar of the of the not so great things. And so I'm happy to be anywhere. North Dakota, here I come. Bismarck! 

That's where I'm from!

That's where my parents are from! I'm North Dakota stock. Wherever from North Dakota are you from? 

Fargo. 

That's where my mother's from. I just played the Fargo Theater with Leo Kottke. My mother is from Fargo, my father's from Casselton. 

No way.

I finally played the Fargo Theater, where my mom used to go see movies and stuff downtown. 

Incredible. Well, you got to come up more. 

Yeah. It was my first time playing in Fargo. I was up there with Leo last year. 

No way, that's incredible! My dad loves Leo Kottke.

Yeah. He's amazing. Oh, that's wonderful. I didn't know you're from North Dakota. That's great. Well, that's where  -- I'm from the stock. North Dakota stock.

I wasn't born there. I was born Adak, Alaska of all weird places. 

Well, that's amazing. I've played in Alaska. I should have listed that, because that was a trip to be up there ... That's cool. Alaska and North Dakota. Wow.

Yeah, military dad.

Man, Diane, me too. What's going on here?

There's some synchronicity, right?

No wonder this one's so well.

Well, thanks, Dave King, pleasure.

Pleasure's mine. Thank you for having me. I'm glad to be back.

The Bad Plus will perform with Marc Ribot's Ceramic Dog and Alan Sparhawk at First Avenue on Saturday, June 10. Tickets