For two years, the musician known as Flea led a double life.
From 2022 through 2024, he spent his nights headlining stadiums on five continents with his band the Red Hot Chili Peppers, thrilling tens of thousands of fans at each gig with his funk-meets-punk bass playing and hyperactive performances. Back in the hotel rooms, though, he filled his mornings with a more private pursuit: religious daily practice on the trumpet, an instrument he first picked up as a child.
“I just felt really lucky to have that time,” he said in a video interview last month from his Los Angeles home, a rack of basses visible behind him. He recalled relishing the struggle inherent in the process, feeling “frustrated on the days when I felt like I wasn’t getting any better, really excited on the days where I felt like I got a modicum, [using an expletive of exasperation] centimeter, millimeter better.”
The public-facing result of Flea’s devotion is “Honora,” his full-length solo debut. Out March 27, it finds him on both trumpet and electric bass, supported by a core cast of contemporary jazz luminaries — the guitarist Jeff Parker; the bassist Anna Butterss, playing upright; and the multi-instrumentalist Josh Johnson, who also produced the album — as well as the drummer Deantoni Parks, known for his work with André 3000 and the Mars Volta. In May, the band will play live in the United States and Europe, including dates in Britain and Germany.
“To me, it all goes together so well, ’cause it’s all so me,” Flea, 63, said, wearing a white tank top, thick chain necklace and big black glasses with gold trim. “I never had a conversation with myself about ‘Oh, this fits,’ or, ‘This doesn’t fit.’ It was just, ‘I like this feeling, I like this feeling, I like this feeling,’ create a loose structure for what it could be, get together with musicians who are sensitive and caring, and go for it.”
Largely instrumental, the album features high-profile vocal cameos from Nick Cave and Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, as well as subtle contributions from fellow Chili Peppers Chad Smith and John Frusciante. Originals both buoyant and meditative share space on the track list with an eclectic array of covers. The album is named after the artist’s paternal great-great-grandmother, whose life in Ireland and later Australia, filled with poverty and hardship, Flea learned about while participating in a recent episode of the PBS show “Finding Your Roots.” (A late 1960s photograph of his mother-in-law, who later immigrated from Iran, adorns the cover.)
It’s a hard album to sum up in shorthand, which is, as Johnson, the album’s producer, suggested in a video interview, one of its strengths. “There’s a convenience in describing it as his jazz album or his trumpet album,” Johnson said, noting that he sees Flea’s project more holistically: “I think how it works together is because it’s all different doorways to him.”
During a phone interview, John Lurie, the multi-instrumentalist and composer who formerly led the Lounge Lizards — and the bassist’s friend of more than 40 years — praised “A Plea,” a springy, hypnotic “Honora” jam built around a spiraling Flea bass line. “That’s not rock, that’s not jazz, that’s music,” he said. “Which is as it should be.”
Jazz and trumpet entered Flea’s life long before rock and bass. He recalled entering a state of “absolute awe” when his stepfather, Walter Urban Jr., a jazz bassist, would hold living-room jam sessions in the family home in Larchmont, N.Y. At age 11, after the family moved to Los Angeles, he picked up trumpet in junior high, drawing inspiration from great jazz hornmen.
“My first real love as a trumpet player was Clifford Brown,” he said, “where I was just floored and devastated by the power and beauty of it.”
He played in the school band and took lessons from Jane Sager, a veteran big-band trumpeter, but an invitation to play bass in a rock band featuring his friends and future Chili Peppers bandmates Hillel Slovak and Jack Irons pulled him in another direction. Still, his early trumpet forays gave him a sense of what was possible on the instrument.
“My studies were very remedial, and I never advanced beyond not a very evolved harmonic sense or understanding of the complicated language of jazz, but I knew what beautiful was,” he said, “and I was always reaching for that beauty.”
That quest wouldn’t resume in earnest until around 50 years later, in the Inglewood, Calif., home of Rickey Washington, a longtime musician and educator who had taught his own son, the future saxophone force Kamasi Washington, from a young age. Flea, by then a Grammy-winning, Rock & Roll Hall of Fame–inducted icon, had sought him out through Kamasi, a friend and sometime collaborator, when he felt compelled to pick up the horn again as he neared his 60th birthday. Around this time, he made a two-year vow to practice trumpet “every day, no matter what, period” and then record an album documenting his progress.
Rickey taught him in a hands-on way, guiding him to sing and play tunes in all 12 keys, and internalize scales and licks. In a phone interview, Rickey recalled saying to Flea, “‘We’re going to learn intuitively, and then we’re going to learn academically.’”
“It was very good to see his growth,” added Rickey, who cameos on “Honora,” playing flute. “Some of the things were difficult for him to learn, but he was consistent — persistent. And he continued to learn, and he’s a formidable trumpet player now.”
Studying with Rickey gave Flea a framework he’d long yearned for. “I’d always hear about musicians having mentors, especially jazz musicians,” he said. “But honestly I’ve never had that with anyone in my life.” When he arrived for his first lesson, Flea recalled that Rickey said to him, “‘I’m going to show you these secrets. This is what jazz musicians learn.’ And I remember I was just like, ‘This is what I’ve wanted my whole life. Sitting in a room with a teacher who wanted to help me realize what I wanted to do.’”
He found a similar support system in the group of local musicians that would form the “Honora” band. He met Johnson through Nate Walcott, the Chili Peppers’ touring keyboardist and another collaborator on the new album. Later, at home, as Flea started to put together ideas for what would become “Honora,” he savored two then-recent albums featuring Johnson: Jeff Parker’s “The Way Out of Easy,” which also included Butterss, the bassist — “It’s as free as Ornette and as focused as the ‘Birth of the Cool,’” he said — and “The Omnichord Real Book,” by the bassist, singer and songwriter Meshell Ndegeocello, which Johnson also produced.
Before sessions for “Honora” began last year, Flea felt nervous about playing with jazz musicians, in part because his stepfather had looked down on rock. “I always felt a deep love for jazz, but a deep insecurity around it,” he said. But once they all entered Hollywood’s Sunset Sound studio, his concerns dissipated. “You know that feeling when something’s so emotional and you almost can cry?” he said. “I was kind of in that space all the time with everybody, just listening to them, and me having my simple things and them honoring everything in such a beautiful way.”
“Everyone just showed up for me,” he added.
Amid the guest vocal appearances and an impassioned Flea monologue on “A Plea” calling for unity amid the divisiveness of our current moment, it’s the leader’s trumpet work that stands out. On the album’s more reflective moments, his lines embody a deep pathos — you can hear it as he shadows Cave’s vocal on a rendition of Jimmy Webb’s “Wichita Lineman,” informed by the Meters’ 1970 version; riffs on the somber arpeggios of Funkadelic’s “Maggot Brain,” played in a chamber-like rendition with vibraphone, clarinet and flute; or blows the chorus melody of Frank Ocean’s “Thinkin’ ’Bout You” against a backdrop of strings.
Johnson said that as a producer he wanted to “remove some of the pressure to contend with all of jazz history.” Instead, he encouraged thinking along the lines of, “Let’s make the melody as beautiful as possible. Let’s think about the phrasing, or let’s think about just clarity and beauty, and that being enough.”
In a video interview, Parker recalled first meeting Flea at an event at the school their children attended. He approached Flea and noted that they both appeared, separately, on the same 2005 Joshua Redman album. “He’s a very musical cat,” Parker said. “He plays the trumpet with a beautiful tone and ideas and phrasing and nuance.”
“Morning Cry,” a playful Flea original, is the album’s most stripped-down track, performed in a live take by him on trumpet, with Parker, Butterss and Parks. In a video interview, Butterss, who uses gender-neutral pronouns, likened the piece to the work of Ornette Coleman (a key Flea influence with whom he had shared the stage): “I was like, ‘If you had told me that Ornette wrote this, I would have believed you.’”
Overall, Butterss said, they came away from the project reflecting on “how rare it is, I think, for an artist who’s so established and has such a successful career to do a full 180 and take on this project that’s really meaningful and really vulnerable and way outside of what they’ve been doing.”
“The dedication and commitment and passion he was putting into it really kind of struck me,” they added.
Since finishing the album, daily practice has remained a ritualized part of Flea’s life: “I wake up every day thinking about, ‘Oh, what am I going to work on, on trumpet today?’” (Likewise, of his solo music, he said with a smile, “There’s more coming.”)
He also noted that, these days, playing trumpet reconnects him to his original love of the instrument.
“It gives shape to things without shape,” he said. “Like, all of a sudden you have this tangible sound, and it still feels like the feeling I had when I was a kid, like all that romance and mystery and hope.”
“And there’s also the times, like, ‘God, I sound like [expletive],’” he added with a laugh. “But I’m working on it.”
Cinematography by Bobby Moser.
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