Whatever you think of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, you have to admire Michael Peter Balzary’s efforts to establish an aesthetic hinterland beyond the unit-shifting funk-rock of his regular band. Even at the height of the Chilis’ socks-on-cocks tomfoolery, Flea was telling anyone who’d listen that Gang Of Four were the greatest band who ever lived, acting in indie movies like My Own Private Idaho, investigating Transcendental Meditation and playing lounge jazz with Mike Watt. Since the turn of the millennium, he’s ramped up his extra-curricular activities, forming supergroups with Damon Albarn and Thom Yorke, and guesting with the likes of Patti Smith, Tom Waits and Morrissey.
Whatever you think of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, you have to admire Michael Peter Balzary’s efforts to establish an aesthetic hinterland beyond the unit-shifting funk-rock of his regular band. Even at the height of the Chilis’ socks-on-cocks tomfoolery, Flea was telling anyone who’d listen that Gang Of Four were the greatest band who ever lived, acting in indie movies like My Own Private Idaho, investigating Transcendental Meditation and playing lounge jazz with Mike Watt. Since the turn of the millennium, he’s ramped up his extra-curricular activities, forming supergroups with Damon Albarn and Thom Yorke, and guesting with the likes of Patti Smith, Tom Waits and Morrissey.
He’s also gravitated back towards his first instrument – trumpet – and his first musical love, jazz (his stepdad Walter Urban Jr used to host bebop jams at their house in Hollywood). It’s a sideline he’s taken seriously; he even enrolled to study music theory and composition at the University of Southern California, and more recently signed up for jazz lessons with Kamasi Washington’s dad Rickey. Approaching his 60th birthday, Flea realised that if he didn’t make his long-talked-about solo record now he never would, so he resolved to practise the trumpet every day for two years and make an album at the end of it, come what way. <Honora> is the impressive result.
Flea’s best move has been to recruit some of the most interesting musicians currently blurring the boundaries between jazz, funk, indie and experimental rock: saxophonist Josh Johnson, guitarist Jeff Parker, bassist Anna Butterss and drummer Deantoni Parks. The warm, limber sound they make together inevitably overlaps with that of Parker’s excellent ETA IVtet, in which Johnson and Butterss also play.
Flea’s musical and philosophical manifesto is laid out across the seven minutes of “A Plea”, essentially Sun Ra’s “Nuclear War” retooled for a time when the overriding threat is not (necessarily) mass irradiation by a foreign power but being gunned down in the street by your own government forces. People like to say that the solutions to these confrontations are complex, but Flea insists it’s actually pretty simple: “Everyone just wants to be loved… And everything besides love is cowardice”.
This bravura opener is offset by the tense, slippery groove of “Traffic Lights” – featuring a tense, slippery vocal from Flea’s old Atoms For Peace bandmate, Thom Yorke – and the slow, dubby, cinematic build of “Frailed”. These are presumably the “deep hypnotic grooves” that Flea had initially envisaged creating way back in 1991, and it might have been nice to hear more of them.
However, it’s hard to deny that Flea’s trumpet-playing sounds more emotionally uninhibited when riffing on someone else’s tune, exemplified by a moving version of Funkadelic’s mournful mind-mangler “Maggot Brain”. Ann Ronnell’s jazz standard “Willow Weep For Me” is not especially improved by a swarm of space-invader synths; but a subtly orchestrated take on Frank Ocean’s “Thinkin About You” is a triumph, with Flea playing the song’s tumbling, wistful verses on bass guitar before passionately blasting out its glorious chorus melody on a flumpet (a hybrid of a flugelhorn and a trumpet).
One final twirl of that impressive Rolodex finds Nick Cave wandering in to sing “Wichita Lineman”, given the gentlest of midnight swings by the band. Taken on its own merits, it’s brilliant and beautiful. Of course it is: it’s Nick Cave doing “Wichita Lineman”. But it also feels like too much of a sure thing for an album attempting – largely successfully – to tap into a culture that’s all about spontaneity and risk.
So maybe this could have been two different records: the big-name covers album and the back-room jam session. But in terms of conveying the passions, frustrations and intriguing contractions of its restless instigator, Honora is perfect.
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