For more than 40 years, Flea has remained one of the most recognizable and elastic musicians to rise from L.A.’s underground music scene. Even as the Red Hot Chili Peppers moved away from the wiry brilliance of Mother’s Milk and Blood Sugar Sex Magik into a stretch of increasingly pedestrian albums, Flea remains driven by boundless imagination. It’s a quality that propels his curiosity to extend far beyond the familiar contours of RHCP’s repertoire. With Honora, his first offering under his own name, Flea opens up a liminal space where jazz phrasing, psychedelic haze, and cosmic drift fuse into a vast and unmoored sound.
Released by Nonesuch Records, Honora finds Flea (born Michael Balzary) stepping away from his bass while delving into the mysterious regions of jazz and psychedelia. The trumpet he wielded in such notable early ’90s numbers as RHCP’s “Pretty Little Ditty” (from Mother’s Milk) and Jane’s Addiction’s “Idiot’s Rule” (from Nothing Shocking) rings out here with subtlety and sincerity.
Honora settles into a thick flow of slow and luminous currents, as Flea follows instinct rather than flash, shaping the album’s immersive grooves and meditative reverie.
Not every experiment lands. Flea’s spoken-word and sung passages are occasionally too on the nose, tipping into a kind of earnestness that distracts from the music’s quiet strengths. But those moments are offset by an extraordinary supporting cast. Guitar player Jeff Parker brings the same understated brilliance that defines his instrumental prowess in Tortoise, and with his more recent work leading the ETA IVtet. Here, Parker is joined by two other ETA IVtet members, stand up bass player Anna Butterss and saxophone and keyboard player Josh Johnson—the latter of whom also produced the album.
Parker, Butterss, and Johnson ground Honora with depth and atmosphere, swaying between charged rhythms and billowing ambiance in songs such as “A Plea,” “Traffic Lights” (featuring Thom Yorke of Radiohead), and the album’s most profoundly psychedelic excursion, “Frailed.” Here, Flea plays bass alongside an expanded cast of characters including drummer Deantoni Parks, Warren Ellis playing viola and flute, Nathaniel Walcott on Fender Rhodes, percussionist Mauro Refosco, and fellow RHCP bandmate John Frusciante playing trumpet and providing snare drum treatments.
Nick Cave’s voice on a cover of “Wichita Lineman” settles into the song with a hushed, embered calm, turning Jimmy Webb’s wide-open meditation into something slower and more weathered, delivering the aching gravitas that only Cave can summon.
With Honora, Flea stakes his claim as the architect of his own new world, shedding expectations and following his instincts.
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