{"id":549898,"date":"2026-03-28T06:17:07","date_gmt":"2026-03-28T06:17:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/549898\/"},"modified":"2026-03-28T06:17:07","modified_gmt":"2026-03-28T06:17:07","slug":"flea-honora-album-review-pitchfork","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/549898\/","title":{"rendered":"Flea: Honora Album Review | Pitchfork"},"content":{"rendered":"

A couple of years ago, Flea<\/a> had an idea. The Red Hot Chili Peppers<\/a> 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\u2019s two-year-long stadium tour, he\u2019d practice playing the trumpet\u2014an instrument he\u2019d learned as a kid but never mastered\u2014every single day. Then, regardless of how much his skills had progressed, he\u2019d make a record. By the time the tour ended, he\u2019d undergone hundreds of practice sessions, spent innumerable hours working with L.A. jazz legend Rickey Washington (father of Kamasi<\/a>), 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\u2014an album that sounds nothing like the music that made him famous.<\/p>\n

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 Andr\u00e9 3000<\/a>, who followed the drift of his curiosity about the many forms of the flute, Flea is reconnecting with the oldest parts of himself. \u201cI\u2019m FLOATING, waves of light are surging through all of me, I\u2019m rolling around on the floor laughing, wall, carpet, ceiling, sweat, window, kick drum, shimmering golden color,\u201d he writes in his memoir, Acid for the Children. Watching his stepfather and a few friends vamp through the jazz standard \u201cCherokee\u201d turned him inside out. \u201cIf Moses had parted the seas right in front of me, or my dog started speaking the Queen\u2019s English, it would not have been this miraculous,\u201d he adds. He was 8 years old.<\/p>\n

No score yet, be the first to add.<\/p>\n

Honora isn\u2019t 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 Andr\u00e9 3000\u2019s New Blue Sun<\/a>. Instead, it\u2019s 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 \u201cAround the World\u201d or his One Hot Minute vocal cut \u201cPea\u201d 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<\/a> may feel vindicated. Should Honora need to be classified, jazz is as apt a descriptor as any. But more than anything, it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

The Red Hot Chili Peppers have been so popular for so long, it\u2019s easy to take Flea\u2019s melodic idiosyncrasy for granted. But listen to the nauseated slide of the \u201cGive It Away\u201d 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 \u201cMorning Cry\u201d introduces itself with a flurry of post-bop stabs straight out of Thelonious Monk<\/a>\u2019s discography, the band falls back and lets him explore the song\u2019s edges. He moves tentatively at first, but once he finds his balance, he walks a tightrope between tonality and atonality, with Jeff Parker<\/a>\u2019s 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\u2019s bass-playing. In the context of \u201cMorning Cry,\u201d it makes him and Parker sound like Miles Davis<\/a> and Wayne Shorter<\/a> on \u201cNefertiti.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A couple of years ago, Flea had an idea. The Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist was turning 60…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":549899,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[776,88,777],"class_list":{"0":"post-549898","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-albums","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-web"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/549898","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=549898"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/549898\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/549899"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=549898"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=549898"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=549898"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}