To be honest, when it is announced that a very famous rocker who is a member of an even more famous band releases a solo album, it is hard not to be a little skeptical. This is the case of Flea, the charismatic bassist of Red Hot Chili Peppers, who has just released Honora, not exactly his first work outside of his former band, but almost. Experience shows that these works respond to certain concerns, and almost none are good. For example, the album may be made up of those songs that the band won’t let him include in the mother band’s albums. Fortunately, this is not the case. Although some bass riffs remind you that you can take Flea out of the Peppers, but you can’t take the Peppers out of Flea, Honora has little or nothing to do with their style: it is, to sum up, indulgent jazz.
It is also possible that it sounds like an attempt to start a commercial solo career. This rarely goes well, and usually means the band has only 10 minutes left. This is not the case either; fans of Californian funk macho can breathe easy. Besides, it doesn’t seem like a 63-year-old millionaire is looking to start his own career, although you never know, and given the good reception of Honora, he might be encouraged to launch it. What is clear is that he is not doing it for money.
There is another less harmful category: those recordings where the musician seeks to express their private tastes. These are interesting albums, a category in themselves, listened to with interest, but whose enjoyment is more intellectual than physical. This is an album that refers to the spiritual jazz and soul of the sixties and seventies. It sounds like Flea’s interpretation of the classics by Alice Coltrane, Don Cherry, or Gil Scott-Heron. He even dares to play at being a pocket-sized Miles Davis, and it’s even funny. One way or another, many of his confessed passions appear here. In his biography, Acid For The Children (2019), he included Agent Orange, by Frank Ocean, in a list titled Albums I listen to over and over again, so it’s no surprise that he includes an instrumental version of ‘Thinking Bout You’. There are really curious things like the best song on the album being a version of a country classic, ‘Wichita Lineman’, sung by Nick Cave, the man who said: “Every time I walk past a stereo and think ‘What is this fucking shit?’, the answer is Red Hot Chili Peppers,” a remark that haunted the band for decades and for which the Australian has apologized.
Friends like Thom Yorke or Mauro Refosco, with whom he formed the project Atoms For Peace, also participate, and he is accompanied by a band of great musicians, led by the exceptional saxophonist Josh Johnson. Additionally, Flea returns to his first instrument: the trumpet, which he plays with much more feeling than technique, which is always good. It was discovered some time ago that the man who liked to appear brainless and cultivated that image for decades was much more sensible than he seemed. He has taken off the mask; Flea is a restless and sensitive guy, and his album is too.
Honora
Nonesuch / Warner
