A Name Older Than the Band
Flea has spent thirty-seven years being the loudest bassist in the room. Slapping, popping, running eighth notes under Anthony Kiedis while a stadium loses its mind — that’s the job description most people know him by. So it says something that when he finally made a record with his own name on the spine, he barely picked up the bass, and he didn’t call it after himself at all.
He called it Honora, after his great-great-grandmother — a woman who lived through poverty in Ireland and then emigrated to Australia to survive it. The cover isn’t Flea. It’s a 1960s photograph of his mother-in-law, Shahin Badiyan, taken in Iran. So before you’ve heard a note, the album has told you what it’s actually about: not the guy in the RHCP posters, but the lineage behind him — the women who crossed oceans so he could eventually stand on a stage in the first place.
That’s a strange, quiet way to open a “solo debut.” Most rock musicians who finally step out alone make the record about themselves. Flea made his about ancestry, migration, and hardship he never personally lived through but clearly carries. It reframes the whole project before you get to the music: this isn’t an ego exercise. It’s a record about where you come from and what you owe it.
And what he says he owes it, in this case, is jazz. He’s been chasing it for 35 years — going back to school at USC in his forties to learn theory he’d never formally studied, founding a music non-profit in 2001, playing trumpet quietly on the side while the day job kept selling out arenas. Honora is what that chase finally sounds like on tape: six originals plus covers of Funkadelic, Jimmy Webb, Frank Ocean, and a 1932 jazz standard, all filtered through a horn player who spent most of his career known for something else entirely.
The Credits Page Is Where the Story Is
If you want to understand Honora, read the personnel list before the songs.
The producer is Josh Johnson — the saxophonist and beat-conscious jazz producer behind some of Meshell Ndegeocello’s recent records, which is reportedly what got Flea’s attention in the first place. Flea knew him already as a horn player from a Chili Peppers session, but it was Johnson’s production work elsewhere that convinced him this was the person to build the record with.
The core band is a small, serious jazz unit: Jeff Parker on guitar (Tortoise, Chicago’s improvised-music scene), Anna Butterss on upright bass, Deantoni Parks on drums, and Johnson himself doubling on sax and keys. That’s the engine room — and notice what’s missing from it. No electric bass chair for Flea to occupy out of habit. He put himself on trumpet, Flumpet, and vocals instead, which meant learning to be a guest in his own band.
Then the credits widen out into a genuinely strange, lovely cast: Rickey Washington — father of Kamasi Washington and, per Flea, a real mentor during his late-life dive into jazz study — on alto flute. Warren Ellis, of Nick Cave’s Bad Seeds and Dirty Three, on flute and viola. Sasha Berliner on vibraphone. Mauro Refosco on percussion. Chad Smith, Flea’s actual RHCP drummer, shows up for exactly one track, like a cameo from the day job. And John Frusciante — Flea’s other, longest-running bandmate — is credited with “treatments,” and separately handles the entire mix on track nine.
That last one is worth sitting with if you’ve been following what Frusciante’s been up to lately: he spent 2001 making a bedroom record called To Record Only Water for Ten Days while RHCP were selling out stadiums around him, and now, decades on, he’s the one person Flea trusts to mix the most exposed, least “produced” song on his own solo debut. Same two people, same band, still handing each other the quiet, strange work when it matters.
Two features get top billing: Thom Yorke sings, plays piano, and plays synth on “Traffic Lights,” and Nick Cave sings on a cover of Jimmy Webb’s “Wichita Lineman.” Both are the kind of names a label puts on a sticker. But the record’s most interesting moment isn’t either of them.
”A Plea” — The Pun Was Always the Point
Track two is called “A Plea.” Say the album’s artist name and that title back-to-back — Flea, a plea — and you’ll notice the joke about four seconds after it stops being funny and starts being the thesis statement.
It’s seven and a half minutes long, built as a dialogue between electric and upright bass, with Rickey Washington’s flute drifting through it and Flea half-singing, half-speaking in the spirit of Gil Scott-Heron — soul-jazz spoken word, sorrow with a rhythm section under it. The plea itself is his: see the God in everyone. It reads like protest music without quite being political — more a request aimed past ideology, at how people actually treat each other.
What makes it the record’s real mission statement isn’t the lyric, though. It’s the looseness. “A Plea” doesn’t resolve cleanly, doesn’t hit a chorus, doesn’t perform its own virtuosity. Reviewers have described the record’s opening stretch as arguing that imperfection is a form of devotion — that the goal isn’t to prove Flea can play jazz correctly, but to let the playing be searching, unfinished, alive. That’s a very different value system from the one that made him famous. Arena rock rewards precision and spectacle. Spiritual jazz — the Pharoah Sanders, Alice Coltrane lineage this clearly wants to sit near — rewards transcendence over correctness. “A Plea” is the moment Honora commits to the second value system out loud, with a title that’s also a joke about the man singing it.
”Frailed” — Where the Trumpet Meets the Static
If “A Plea” is the mission statement, “Frailed” is the moment the record actually goes somewhere nobody was expecting. At 10:50 it’s the longest thing on Honora by a wide margin, and it’s the one track that stops sounding like a jazz record made by a rock musician and starts sounding like a Frusciante solo record that happens to have a horn player in it.
It opens almost nothing at all: a heartbeat-like pulse, a hi-hat, the deftest bass pluck, something that might be a grazed cymbal. Reviewers keep reaching for film-noir language to describe what happens next — “like the theme to a black-and-white ’70s neo-noir thriller,” all rattling percussion and tense horn crescendos, before it drops into an unexpected smooth piano breakdown around the midpoint and builds back out. Around 1:25 the trumpet arrives — soft, creeping, described by one critic as floating around “like a butterfly drifting about in a light breeze” — and from there it’s Flea, Jeff Parker’s guitar, Warren Ellis’s flute and violin, all trading long, unhurried solos over a bed that never quite resolves. By the end, the trumpet is “dueling with waves of delay,” his own line smeared and echoed back at him electronically rather than just played dry.
The texture underneath all of that is the real story. Alongside the standard rhythm-section elements, there’s a layer of glitchy synths and static — small, dry, ticklish clicks and crackle, closer to circuit-bent noise or a scratched record surface than a ride cymbal keeping time. It’s been compared directly to the fried, granular electronics on John Frusciante’s Maya, his 2014 solo excursion into abstract, acid-adjacent sound design. That’s not a coincidence: Frusciante is credited with “treatments” across Honora, and “Frailed” is where that credit is most audible. It’s the one place the album stops being a jazz record referencing other jazz records and starts being two old bandmates handing each other the strange, textural stuff neither of them gets to do on an RHCP record — Flea on horn instead of bass, Frusciante on noise instead of guitar.
It’s also, by the widest consensus of any track here, the one critics agree on. Where “Willow Weep for Me” splits the room, “Frailed” gets called “worth the price of admission alone,” the spot where “Flea truly finds his sweet spot.” Eleven minutes that start as a heartbeat and end as static — that’s the arc of the whole record in miniature.
”Willow Weep for Me” — The One Without a Famous Name Attached
Between Thom Yorke’s cameo and Nick Cave’s, track nine slips by almost anonymously: “Willow Weep for Me,” a jazz standard from 1932, no featured vocalist, no marquee name. And it’s the one that’s stuck with me.
The song itself has a genuinely great backstory worth knowing before you hear Flea’s version. It was written — words and music both — by Ann Ronell, a composer who studied at Radcliffe and was mentored by, and close friends with, George Gershwin. She wrote it after being struck by the willow trees on her college campus and dedicated it to him. Nearly a century later, it’s still the most-performed jazz standard ever written by a woman, and sits inside the top twenty most-performed standards, period — Billie Holiday’s version is probably the one you already know. The device at its center is simple and a little uncanny: heartbreak addressed directly to a tree, asking it to grieve on your behalf because you can’t quite manage it yourself. A plea, again, if you’re keeping count.
Flea’s take strips almost everything away. By his own account, he “originally did it at home with just synthesizer and trumpet” and didn’t set out to reinvent it — “it was just how I wanted it to sound.” What’s on the record is a hazy, minor-key float: Nathaniel Walcott’s string arrangement sitting low and unresolved underneath, Flea’s trumpet doing the work a vocalist usually does on this song — worrying the melody, bending around the beat rather than sitting on it — and the whole thing mixed by Frusciante rather than the engineer handling the other nine tracks, which is presumably why it sounds like it’s arriving from a slightly different, more private room than the rest of the album.
It’s also, tellingly, the track critics can’t agree on. One review called it a “distorted slog” that clashes with the album’s Old Hollywood tone elsewhere; another heard “a moody, atmospheric piece that allows Flea to dance over the proceedings with his hypnotic trumpet tone.” I land with the second camp, but I think the disagreement itself is the interesting part. This is the one song on Honora with nothing to hide behind — no Thom Yorke vocal, no Nick Cave gravitas, no Frank Ocean interpolation to signal “this is meant to be interesting.” Just a rock bassist, alone with a horn, inside a 94-year-old standard written by a woman most listeners have never heard of, being mixed by his oldest bandmate. Whether it lands for you or not, it’s the moment the record stops performing “Flea does jazz” and just sounds like a person playing something he loves, quietly, because he finally can.
Why It’s Worth Hearing
Honora isn’t a great jazz record in the sense of pushing the form anywhere new — nobody’s claiming that, including Flea. What it is, is a genuinely honest one: a 63-year-old musician spending his actual solo debut not on the instrument that made him famous, not even on a title with his own name in it, but on his great-great-grandmother, a stack of songs he loves, and the handful of people — Johnson, Washington, Frusciante — who helped him get there. “A Plea” tells you what he’s asking for. “Willow Weep for Me” is where you can actually hear it.
Standout Tracks:
- A Plea (the title-pun mission statement — Gil Scott-Heron spoken-word soul-jazz, Rickey Washington on flute)
- Frailed (the 10:50 centerpiece — noir horns into glitch static, Frusciante’s “treatments” credit at its most audible)
- Willow Weep for Me (no features, no armor — trumpet and strings on a 1932 standard, mixed by John Frusciante)
- Traffic Lights ft. Thom Yorke (the marquee feature — Yorke on vocals, piano, and synth)
- Wichita Lineman ft. Nick Cave (Jimmy Webb cover, Flea on Flumpet)
- Maggot Brain (instrumental Funkadelic cover, Eddie Hazel/George Clinton)
Credits (core): Flea — bass, trumpet, Flumpet, vocals. Jeff Parker — guitar. Anna Butterss — upright bass. Deantoni Parks — drums. Josh Johnson — production, saxophone, keyboards. Additional: Rickey Washington, Warren Ellis, Sasha Berliner, Mauro Refosco, Nathaniel Walcott (Fender Rhodes, string arrangement), John Frusciante (treatments; mix, track 9), Chad Smith (drums, track 1). Mixing: Ryan Hewitt (tracks 1–8, 10). Mastering: Eric Boulanger.
Notes: Released March 27, 2026 on Nonesuch Records — Flea’s debut solo album after 35 years of wanting to make it. Named for his great-great-grandmother; cover photo is his mother-in-law, Shahin Badiyan, in 1960s Iran. Debuted at #1 on the jazz charts in the UK, Australia, France, and Germany.
Why This One Stuck (Postscript)
This record resonates differently after Jazz em Agosto. I saw Bonbon Flamme and SML five days apart at the Gulbenkian this August — one a vibrant, almost theatrical French cello quartet, the other a patient, hypnotic LA groove machine built around Anna Butterss and Josh Johnson, the same rhythm section quietly running through Honora’s credits. Bonbon Flamme is closer to what I expected “jazz at a festival” to sound like. SML is what actually explained this album to me.
Watching Butterss and Johnson build a groove from almost nothing, live, is what made “A Plea” and “Frailed” click in a way the studio versions hadn’t quite managed alone — that same comfort with static space, with letting a phrase sit until someone else decides to move it. Flea didn’t just hire good jazz musicians for his debut. He hired people with a specific, patient, hypnotic method he clearly wanted to borrow. Seeing that method performed live, outside the context of “Flea’s solo album” entirely, is what made me hear Honora less as a curiosity and more as a genuine apprenticeship record. Full write-up of the two shows (and the connections between them) is in the Jazz em Agosto quick note.