A couple of years ago, Flea had an idea. The Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist was turning 60 and taking stock of what he wanted to do with the rest of his life. He made a deal with himself: During RHCP’s two-year-long stadium tour, he’d practice playing the trumpet—an instrument he’d learned as a kid but never mastered—every single day. Then, regardless of how much his skills had progressed, he’d make a record. By the time the tour ended, he’d undergone hundreds of practice sessions, spent innumerable hours working with L.A. jazz legend Rickey Washington (father of Kamasi), and racked up untold numbers of noise complaints in hotels around the world. He hooked up with some of the most interesting and idiosyncratic players in the Los Angeles jazz scene and, true to his word, is now releasing the first bona fide solo album of his career—an album that sounds nothing like the music that made him famous.
Does this story sound a little familiar? Flea is not the first charming weirdo from a hyper-popular and era-defining group who has pivoted to jazz. But unlike André 3000, who followed the drift of his curiosity about the many forms of the flute, Flea is reconnecting with the oldest parts of himself. “I’m FLOATING, waves of light are surging through all of me, I’m rolling around on the floor laughing, wall, carpet, ceiling, sweat, window, kick drum, shimmering golden color,” he writes in his memoir, Acid for the Children. Watching his stepfather and a few friends vamp through the jazz standard “Cherokee” turned him inside out. “If Moses had parted the seas right in front of me, or my dog started speaking the Queen’s English, it would not have been this miraculous,” he adds. He was 8 years old.
No score yet, be the first to add.
Honora isn’t the kind of lark or vanity project that sometimes results when successful musicians try their hand at another genre. Nor is it characterized by the humbled awe that shined throughout André 3000’s New Blue Sun. Instead, it’s a mature and compositionally sophisticated collection of songs whose only real unifying thread is that Flea is very excited to be playing all of them. Fans expecting the screwball energy he brings to “Around the World” or his One Hot Minute vocal cut “Pea” may be disappointed; anyone who has ever shouted in your ear at a party that, actually, the Chili Peppers would be so good if it were just Flea and John Frusciante may feel vindicated. Should Honora need to be classified, jazz is as apt a descriptor as any. But more than anything, it’s the record Flea was always meant to make and a record only Flea could make. For much of its run-time, you can practically hear him FLOATING.
The Red Hot Chili Peppers have been so popular for so long, it’s easy to take Flea’s melodic idiosyncrasy for granted. But listen to the nauseated slide of the “Give It Away” bassline and try to think of anything else on Top 40 radio before or since that sounds like that. He brings that same spirit to the trumpet. After “Morning Cry” introduces itself with a flurry of post-bop stabs straight out of Thelonious Monk’s discography, the band falls back and lets him explore the song’s edges. He moves tentatively at first, but once he finds his balance, he walks a tightrope between tonality and atonality, with Jeff Parker’s guitar egging him on. He blows empty air through his trumpet, then skitters a pattern that sounds as much like a turntable scratch as it does a jazz solo. This woozy precision and the presence of control despite the illusion of freakazoid chaos is central to Flea’s bass-playing. In the context of “Morning Cry,” it makes him and Parker sound like Miles Davis and Wayne Shorter on “Nefertiti.”
