Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea is a man of many talents. Making his entrance on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon last night, he proceeded to walk about on his hands for a bit before sitting down to discuss Honora, his new jazz-leaning solo album. This sees playing not only bass guitar but also trumpet.
Before getting to all that, though, Flea had to address his obvious head injury, which was covered by a plaster. After initially claiming that he’d suffered it while seeing off a gang of hoodlums who were robbing old ladies, he admitted that it was the result of a “bizarre peeing accident” – after going to the toilet during a radio recording session, he was rushing back to the studio and ran straight into a glass door. Ouch.
With that out of the way, talk turned to the why and how of the new album, with Flea revealing that the trumpet was actually his first musical love.
Article continues below“I played the trumpet when I was a little kid,” he explained. “I was in love with it. I wanted to be Dizzy Gillespie when I grew up.”
In fact, it turns out that Flea actually had a real-life encounter with his then hero.
“I met Dizzy Gillespie when I was a kid,” he confirmed. “He hugged me into his suit. I still remember the smell of his cologne, his nice suit, and his kindness with me.”
The course of Flea’s musical life changed when his friend Hillel Slovak – subject of a new Netflix documentary – asked him to play bass in the band that would end up becoming the Red Hot Chili Peppers, but it sounds like the trumpet was an itch that Flea could never quite resist the urge to scratch.
“Every once in a while I'd pick it up and kind of want to play,” he told Fallon. “It's always alive in my head and my heart.”
Warming to his theme, Flea said: “For me, the jazz musicians – Clifford Brown, John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk – these are the guys that gave the greatest gift that this country ever gave to the world. They raised the bar, the cultural bar, so high that people like me are always yearning and trying to reach it all their lives. And a few years ago, I decided, 'I'm just going to play trumpet every day, no matter what. And after a couple of years of doing it, I'm going to make a record. And what comes, comes.'
“You know, it wasn't really about the means to an end. It was just the process, the learning process. And I'm so happy that I had the opportunity to do it.”
Flea’s passion for the project comes across in his musical performance on Fallon – a cover of Frank Ocean’s 2012 debut single Thinkin Bout You, which features him switching between bass guitar and trumpet. Other members of the band include Jeff Parker on guitar, Anna Butterss on bass, Deantoni Parks on drums and Josh Johnson, who produced the album, on keyboards
Honora is released on Friday 27 March on Nonesuch Records, and features contributions from Thom Yorke and Nick Cave. It features both original songs and covers, including one of Jimmy Webb’s Wichita Lineman.
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