Flea, bassist for the Red Hot Chili Peppers, delivers a stunning jazz album with “Honora”

We knew Flea as the volcanic bassist of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, a bouncy figure embodying funk to the point of caricature. With Honora, he radically shifts our perspective. On this first solo album, Michael Balzary returns to one of his first loves, the trumpet, and delivers a free, soulful, and delicate jazz record where fervor takes precedence over virtuosity. The result is as surprising as it is impressive: far from a mere side project, Honora stands out as an intimate, ambitious, and profoundly musical work.

A return to the trumpet to rediscover the essentials

While Flea made his mark on rock history with his instantly recognizable bass playing, his earliest connection to music was through the trumpet. As he wrote in his 2019 autobiography, *Teens on Acid*, this instrument was, for him, "the queen of instruments." Raised on jazz, introduced at a young age to Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, and Clifford Brown, he retained a taste for it without ever truly dedicating an entire project to it.

It was as he approached sixty that he finally decided to tackle it seriously, reworking the instrument for two years before entering the studio. This decision gives the album a particular depth: Honora is not a stylistic exercise, but the culmination of a long-held desire. We hear a musician who seeks neither to prove nor to impress, but to achieve a kind of inner truth.

A free-spirited, refined, and superbly supported album

Honora's great success also lies in its balance. Flea never confines himself to a scholarly or austere jazz demonstration. On the contrary, he composes a fluid, warm album, imbued with groove, space, and emotion. According to franceinfo, he surrounded himself with avant-garde musicians such as Jeff Parker, Josh Johnson, Anna Butterss, and Deantoni Parks, and also invited Thom Yorke, Nick Cave, and Warren Ellis. This prestigious lineup, however, never gives the impression of a showcase album: everything serves the same nocturnal, meditative, and supple character.

The covers confirm this freedom. Flea moves seamlessly from Funkadelic to Frank Ocean, from Ann Ronell to Jimmy Webb, without ever giving the impression of simply juxtaposing references. He absorbs these tracks into his own sonic atmosphere. The album thus progresses between spiritual fervor, melancholy, and the pursuit of the perfect groove. More than a detour, Honora feels like a late revelation: that of an artist who, after forty years in the business, still finds a way to reinvent himself with disarming sincerity.