Honora

Flea has been saying he wanted to make this record since 1991. He described it back then as "an instrumental record with deep hypnotic grooves, trippy melodies layered on top, meditations on a groove." Thirty-five years and a few thousand arena shows later, he finally sat down at Sunset Sound in Hollywood with a group of players who could actually pull it off, and Honora is the result. It's not a Red Hot Chili Peppers side project, and it's not a celebrity dabbling in jazz for vanity's sake. This is a proper jazz fusion record made by a guy who played trumpet long before he ever picked up a bass. Flea grew up idolizing Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis, gigged on trumpet all through school, and only shelved it when Hillel Slovak asked him to join what would become RHCP. Four decades later, he spent two years woodshedding his way back to the horn, and you can hear the work paying off on every track.

The band he assembled reads like a who's who of modern jazz. Josh Johnson on saxophone and production, Jeff Parker on guitar, Anna Butterss on upright bass, and Deantoni Parks on drums. All of them rooted in improv and experimental music, all of them capable of going somewhere unexpected at any moment. The record swings between bebop blowing sessions and something much stranger and more textured. "A Plea" is a nearly eight-minute workout where Flea rants over jittery grooves about peace and unity, part Sun Ra, part spoken word sermon. "Frailed" stretches past ten minutes, building from ambient dub into a cinematic trumpet-and-delay duet that might be the best thing here. Then Thom Yorke shows up on "Traffic Lights" and turns it into something that could've been an Atoms for Peace outtake. The back half leans on covers. Funkadelic's "Maggot Brain" reimagined with trumpet where Eddie Hazel's guitar used to scream. Frank Ocean's "Thinkin Bout You" rendered as a wistful jazz standard with strings by Nate Walcott. And Nick Cave singing lead on a genuinely beautiful "Wichita Lineman." The Cave appearance is especially notable if you know the history. Cave once savaged the Chili Peppers publicly, so hearing him croon tenderly on Flea's solo debut feels like a quiet reconciliation.

For anyone who cares about how records are made, and if you're reading this you probably do, the credits are worth studying. The whole thing was tracked at Sunset Sound in February 2025, engineered by Clint Welander and produced by Johnson. Ryan Hewitt mixed most of it at EastWest Studios, but here's a detail that jumped out: "Willow Weep for Me" was mixed by John Frusciante, with additional mixing by Hewitt. Flea's own bandmate stepping in to mix a single track on an otherwise jazz-leaning record is the kind of thing that makes you want to A/B that song against the rest and listen for what Frusciante brought to it. Eric Boulanger mastered the whole album at The Bakery in Culver City, and it's available in 24-bit/44.1kHz on Bandcamp if you want to hear it the way it was meant to land. Honora is named after a beloved family member, and the cover features a 1960s photo of Flea's mother-in-law in Iran. It's personal in a way that most debut solo records from legacy rock musicians never manage to be.

“Flea spent two years woodshedding his way back to the trumpet, and you can hear the work paying off on every track."”