Honora Flea

After a nearly five-decade (and counting) career as one of his generation’s defining rock bassists, Flea releases his first full-length solo album, Honora, on Nonesuch Records. 

Time and space have finally allowed him to return to his first musical loves: jazz and playing the trumpet.  The album features the track ‘Traffic Lights’, co-written with Thom Yorke and Josh Johnson, as well as the previously released ‘A Plea’.  Flea and the Honora band embark on an international tour, playing intimate venues in select cities, this May.
 
For Honora, which takes its name from a beloved family member, Flea composed and arranged the music, and also plays trumpet and bass throughout, joined by an elite crew of modern jazz visionaries: album producer and saxophonist Josh Johnson, guitarist Jeff Parker, bassist Anna Butterss, and drummer Deantoni Parks.  The record features vocals from Flea, as well as friends Thom Yorke and Nick Cave.  Mauro Refosco (David Byrne, Atoms for Peace) and Nate Walcott (Bright Eyes), among others, also join the band.  The album comprises six original songs – including one co-written by Flea, Johnson, and Yorke – as well as interpretations of tunes by George Clinton and Eddie Hazel, Jimmy Webb, Frank Ocean and Shea Taylor, and Ann Ronell.
 
“Deantoni and I played what became ‘Traffic Lights’ the first day,” Flea explains.  “Something about it reminded me of Atoms for Peace, so I sent it to Thom.  Just knowing him, I thought it would be a rhythm and a sensibility that he would relate to.  And I was right, he did.  With a gorgeous melody and the words, you know, about living in the ‘upside down’ and how do you make sense of things when we’re getting all this fake shit and real shit?  Everyone has their ways of dealing with the world.  But he’s just the warmest, free flowing, jamming motherf*cker.”
 
Best known as a founding member and bassist for the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Flea was first introduced to live jazz as a child, when family friends played the music together in his own living room.  “It was the greatest thing I ever saw,” he recalls.  “The wildness, warmth and we of it.  Straight Bebop.  Boom.  I knew there were higher things on this earth, way above the pettiness that had left me disheartened.  The holy trifecta of my life, music, sports and nature was complete.”
 
Though he dreamed of being like his heroes Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, and Clifford Brown, Flea’s path went a different direction: His close friend Hillel Slovak asked him to pick up the bass and join his rock band when he was sixteen, leading Flea into a decades-long career with the hugely successful Chili Peppers.
 
But late one night in 1991, in the midst of that band’s ascent, Flea was acting in the now-classic Gus Van Sant film My Own Private Idaho when he shared with a friend, “I want to make an instrumental record with deep hypnotic grooves, trippy melodies layered on top, meditations on a groove.”  The caveat was that he first needed to get his trumpet-playing together.
 
As Flea neared his sixtieth birthday, he realized if he did not pick up the trumpet again, he probably never would. So he resolved to practice every day for two years–in the midst of a stadium tour with Red Hot Chili Peppers, with a wife and newborn at home. At the end of those two years, he would make an album, regardless of where his knowledge or talents ended up.
 
Until Honora, Flea had never been scared of making music before.  He worried that the all-star band he had assembled would think he was “a non-playing motherf*cker, charlatan, rock poseur or fan.”  But, he says, “It turns out they were all the most genuinely supportive people, moving me deeply and daily with their generous spirits…  Sitting in a room and playing the music with them made me feel like I was on drugs.  I was buzzing, tripping and floating around the studio.  I love them, they truly gave of themselves.  I bow all the way down.”