Flea , HONORA is the debut solo album from one of rock’s most recognizable bassists, released on Nonesuch Records (catalog NS 7893601), and it arrives not as a vanity project but as the result of a genuine, years-long reckoning with an instrument Flea had set aside for decades.
A Bassist Who Always Wanted to Blow Trumpet
Before the Red Hot Chili Peppers, before the stadium tours and the decades of low-end thunder, Flea was a kid who wanted to play jazz trumpet. His heroes were Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, and Clifford Brown. Then his close friend Hillel Slovak handed him a bass at sixteen and redirected the entire trajectory. What followed was one of the most visible careers in rock. But as Flea approached sixty, he made a decision: pick the trumpet back up now, or never. He committed to daily practice for two full years, through a stadium tour, a new marriage, a newborn at home, and no small amount of self-doubt. At the end of those two years, he would make an album regardless of where his playing stood. That album is Honora, named for a beloved family member, and it is the record he was most afraid to make.
Flea , HONORA: The Music and the People Behind It
Flea composed and arranged all original material here, and plays both trumpet and bass throughout the six-track record. The collaborators he assembled are not decorative. Producer and saxophonist Josh Johnson, guitarist Jeff Parker, bassist Anna Butterss, and drummer Deantoni Parks represent a serious cross-section of contemporary jazz. Vocals come from Flea alongside guests Thom Yorke and Nick Cave. Mauro Refosco, known from David Byrne’s band and Atoms for Peace, and Nate Walcott of Bright Eyes also contribute. The tracklist moves between six original compositions, including one co-written by Flea, Johnson, and Yorke, and interpretations of material by George Clinton and Eddie Hazel, Jimmy Webb, Frank Ocean and Shea Taylor, and Ann Ronell. That is a genuinely eclectic spread of source material, handled by players who live in the space between jazz, improvisation, and experimentation.
Why This Pressing Belongs in Your Collection
This is the standard Nonesuch LP pressing of a record that represents something genuinely unusual in the landscape of rock-adjacent solo releases. It is not a bassist dabbling. It is a fifty-year music veteran confronting a lifelong detour and documenting what he found at the other end of two years of disciplined, frightened, earnest work. The combination of high-profile vocal guests, a production team rooted in modern jazz, and a catalogue number from Nonesuch, a label with a long and serious track record in jazz and contemporary classical, gives this record a specific weight. For collectors who follow Jeff Parker, Anna Butterss, or Josh Johnson’s work, this LP sits comfortably in that world. For anyone tracking the edges of where jazz and rock biography intersect, Honora is a document worth owning on vinyl.
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