When Michael Peter Balzary, a.k.a. Flea, was a little boy, his attraction to the trumpet was all-consuming and amorous.
He remembers putting the instrument on his bed and walking out of his room just so he could walk back in and see it there, gleaming with possibility, a vessel for escape and expression that he hadn’t yet fully explored.
“I was very undisciplined as a kid,” Flea admits as he recalls the long, sometimes fraught, but ultimately redemptive journey with jazz music that led to his first solo record, “Honora” (out Friday) featuring trumpet front and center. “I was wild and in the streets, not diligent in any way about anything, but I really loved it.”
Notably, he’s in an environment created to help kids just like he used to be. Silverlake Conservatory of Music, the school he co-founded in 2001, is vibrating with its usual joyful jingle on this warm spring morning. After a walk through the facility, passing romping toddlers and their adoring moms gathered for a class of music and movement, we settle into one of the school’s teaching rooms to discuss the project amidst a smattering of guitars, drums and music note-covered dry erase boards.
But before the interview, Flea takes a meditative break to mentally prepare, eyes closed and breaths deep. I join him in the minute-long mind-clearing and appreciate the intention of the moment. “I didn’t put in the study or the work to be as good as I could have been back then, but I knew how beautiful it was so when I played it, there was always this feeling of yearning to get a good tone,” he says thoughtfully of his first foray with the horn. “So just by virtue of that alone, it became kind of my identity. You know, Mikey plays trumpet. Plus, I was very shy and weird as a kid, so it was something that I did and had a little notoriety for until I started playing bass.”
As bassist for Red Hot Chili Peppers, the band he formed in L.A. with his Fairfax High School buddies in the ‘80s, Flea is now considered one of the most powerful instrumentalists in the world. But recording, touring and promoting the six-time multi-platinum group for the past 40+ years left little time for his childhood fancy.
Still, he never forgot about it. He always had the itch to pick it up again. And he would from time to time — in the solitude of a hotel room during a Peppers tour, looking for a distraction after a bad break-up and when he had precious time off.
Despite all his success as a rock star, the trumpet humbled him, and he thought he’d never be good enough.
“I’d feel so inadequate,” he says. “The trumpet is such a demanding instrument. With the bass, you can not play it for a while, and it’s OK. You can pick it up and get back into it. With the trumpet, it takes weeks just to get a nice sound, let alone understanding theory and different diminished scales, how a diminished scale relates to a minor seventh coming out of a two-five progression into a key change. There’s the cerebral part of the music and studying, which I’m just doing now, and there’s having a sound and some sort of dexterity and strength to play.”
About three years ago as he was nearing his 60th birthday, inspired by the “revolutionary spirit” of L.A. indie jazz figures like Kamasi Washington and Thundercat, he revisited his first musical love with a new mindset.
“There’s like the feeling of the street in the music, like you can feel it and taste it and hear it,” he explains. ”For a long time, jazz, for me, at least, was sounding real academic. It was like,’ OK, you went to school and you know all your s—, but I’m not feeling anything — you’re not making my kidneys dance the Watusi. You’re not making me want to go out and scream, cry or laugh.”
But this time it was different. Reinvigorated by what he was hearing from new school jazzsters, he vowed to master the trumpet like never before. ”It’s always been in my head, my dream to be good at it and to make music with it in a holistic way,” he says. “I resolved at that moment to pick up the trumpet and practice it every single day for two years… at the end of the two years, I said I’ll go into a recording studio and make a record with where I’m at.”
The result is a daring collection of originals and covers that highlight Flea’s unbridled dedication to both the trumpet and bass, but also his eclectic influences and tastes. Moreover, “Honora” employs some top-tier collaborators including input and vocals from Radiohead’s Thom Yorke (whom he worked with previously as Atoms for Peace) and Nick Cave.
Revered producer and saxophonist Josh Johnson, guitarist Jeff Parker, bassist Anna Butterss and drummer Deantoni Parks also bring their considerable chops to the mix, evoking divergent moods while maintaining a signature exuberance throughout.
The first single, “A Plea,” which came out in December, definitely set the tone for his uplifting new experiment, meshing avant-garde rhythms with rousing beats and chants that feel celebratory and hopeful in these divisive days of the daily doomscroll.
“I care about civil rights, I care about the environment. I care about people that are oppressed,” Flea says of the song’s message, fleshed out by a dance performance and arty video directed by his daughter Clara Balzary. “I care very much about the world and trying to make sense and understand this constant, moving thing. But I feel like in particular, going on social media, the back and forth between right and left is so absurd. It’s like, who can do better at making the other person feel bad and who can make the other person feel stupid. It’s not productive. If this country can come to a place of peace and harmony and of productivity, helping people who need help and working together to make it a better place, there has to be love. It’s the only answer.”
Uniting listeners through a love of different music genres is one way to do it, and Flea pays homage to a multitude of styles on “Honora”: George Clinton and Eddie Hazel via a heady and horny rendition of “Maggot Brain,” Jimmy Webb on a rapturous version of his classic “Witchita Lineman” (sung so sublimely by Cave that it makes you yearn to see it live), and even Frank Ocean, on a stirring instrumental cover of the “Channel Orange” gem “Thinkin Bout You.”
Though music nerds will marvel at the impressive amalgamation of sounds and contributors, especially for what’s being classified as a jazz record, it’s pretty clear that Flea took an uncontrived, truly organic approach to putting it all together. “Honora,” named after his great-great-grandmother and featuring a gorgeous vintage photo of his mother-in-law on the cover, is obviously highly personal, self-indulgent even, but it’s also accessible to anyone who loves a potent groove, a whimsical melody and an adventurous vibe.
What started as an independent challenge soon grew into a blossoming collaboration with everyone he brought in. “I had no intention of having any singers on the record at first,” Flea recalls, but following his gut in the studio, he says certain artists and friends popped into his head.
For “Traffic Lights” his first thought was, “Oh I want to play this for Thom, he’d dig and it’s up his alley,” he says. “And then, you know, sitting there with Josh, we were like, maybe he’d want to sing on it. He agreed and just did his thing. And, you know, Thom’s the best. Every time he opens his mouth, it’s beautiful.”
Though Flea exudes a childlike excitement in pretty much everything he does, with “Honora,” there’s also a reflective maturity that’s relatable, especially for longtime fans who’ve grown up with him and his music. From his resolve to finally master his childhood instrument to his explorations of sophisticated soundscapes beyond the RHCP’s rowdy funk-punk, he’s doing exactly what any of us might at 63, given the drive, resources and stature, which he’s earned, sometimes the hard way, the past few decades.
His best-selling 2019 memoir “Acid for the Children” puts a lot of his current ethos into context. Its poetic yet brutal recollections of growing up in his native Australia, then New York and finally Los Angeles outline the troubled home life which set him on a drug-addled musical path. His stepfather, jazz bassist Walter Urban Jr., was mentally abusive, but he was also an influential figure who brought the genre into his life to begin with, hosting bebop jams in the family living room.
“My life was pretty scary at home,” he says. “Something that really kind of crystallized recently — I’ve expressed in interviews that I was nervous about trying to play jazz as a trumpet player and having jazz musicians looking down on me as a rock guy. That’s because jazz musicians know all this music, all this language and theory that I didn’t learn when I was a kid. Growing up with my stepfather and his cronies, it was very common amongst them to have the attitude that rock music was garbage and that rock musicians couldn’t play. So in my rebellious youth I was like,”‘I’m not gonna play the trumpet, I’m gonna play bass!”
He’s since come to realize that he’d been wrestling with complex feelings, “which were childhood feelings,” and much of the debauchery of his past was about “looking for community and looking for connection.” He found it as a father of three — daughters Clara, 37, and Sunny Bebop, 20, from previous relationships, and son Darius, 3, with wife Melody Ehsani, who was pregnant when he reconnected with the trumpet. He credits his partner with “bringing stability to my life which has really helped me to work in a focused way.”
“Honora” is a grown-up record, but the bassist’s antics and ground-breaking bombastic jams with the Peppers — including their early L.A. club reign performing in crazy costumes or nothing more than socks on their crotches — will never be forgotten. The new documentary, “The Rise of the Red Hot Chili Peppers: Our Brother, Hillel” which debuted on Netflix last week, chronicles their tempestuous trajectory, but the band has distanced themselves from the film, releasing a joint statement that they had “nothing to do with it creatively,” though they did provide the interviews that anchor the project focused on founding member Hillel Slovak, who died of an overdose before they garnered mainstream success.
When asked if he, Anthony Kiedis, John Frusciante and Chad Smith might one day authorize their own doc telling their full story their way, Flea says they’ve talked about it but it’s not something they’re considering. “It comes up from time to time,” he says. “I feel like we’ve always been so in the moment of creating and evolving and doing our work, it seems strange to sit back and do a sort of retrospective.”
To that end, he reveals that the group have been working on new material even as he’s promoting the solo project. “They’re supportive,” he says of his bandmates. “They always want to work and do Chili Pepper stuff, but I think they’re happy for me to enjoy doing what I’m doing. We’ve been going hard with the Chili Peppers for a long time. I think everybody, in their own way, enjoys some time for the other aspects of their life.”
He seems happy and fulfilled right now, at the music school, talking about his family and working with talented friends, though he is still actively pushing himself where the trumpet is concerned, practicing and composing daily. He says there’s a lot of material he didn’t put on “Honora,” so hopefully, there’ll be a follow-up. Personal challenges aside, the solo effort (which he’ll tour live beginning in May) is a dynamic listening experience that documents the progressive skill and heart of a musical multi-tasker like no other. It’s intuitive and inspiring.
“Something I’m always talking about is trusting the way that you feel,” Flea says as we finish up. “Everyone has beautiful instincts — everybody — but it’s like, how many people trust them? They look for other people’s validation or someone to tell them if their instinct is good or not… At this point, I trust my instincts and I want to be myself. I don’t want anything to stop me from being myself.”
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