Flea turned 64 on Friday, October 16, and for the first time in a career that runs back to the Los Angeles punk clubs of the early 1980s, the birthday arrives with a solo album on his résumé. Honora, a jazz record he made with producer and saxophonist Josh Johnson, came out on Nonesuch Records on March 27, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist spent May taking it to ten small rooms across North America and Europe.
Born Michael Peter Balzary in Melbourne, Australia, in 1962, he moved with his family to Rye, New York, at four, after his father took a job at the Australian consulate there. His mother later married jazz musician Walter Abdul Urban Jr., and the bebop sessions in that house are where the trumpet first grabbed him, decades before he recorded with one.
From Fear to the Hall of Fame
The punk chapter was short but real. Hillel Slovak taught him bass and pulled him into his band Anthym; Flea quit after a few months to play for the Los Angeles punk band Fear, then returned to Slovak, Anthony Kiedis and Jack Irons for what was meant to be a one-off gig. That group became the Red Hot Chili Peppers, formed in 1983. Flea and Kiedis are the two original members still in the lineup, and the band entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in April 2012.
Along the way he built a side career on screen, starting as a young punk named Razzle in Penelope Spheeris’s Suburbia (1984) and running through Back to the Future Part II and Part III, The Big Lebowski, and the voice of the “mind cop” Jake in Pixar’s Inside Out and its 2024 sequel. He co-founded the Silverlake Conservatory of Music, a nonprofit for underprivileged children, in 2001 and published a memoir, Acid for the Children, in 2019.
The solo record, by the numbers
A little arithmetic shows how long Honora was in coming. The Chili Peppers formed in 1983 and the album arrived in 2026, a gap of 43 years between his first steady band and his first solo LP. He was 63 on release day, since his 64th birthday was still seven months off.
The record has ten tracks and runs 51 minutes 12 seconds. Six are originals; the rest are covers of Funkadelic’s “Maggot Brain,” Jimmy Webb’s “Wichita Lineman” (sung by Nick Cave), Frank Ocean’s “Thinkin Bout You” and the standard “Willow Weep for Me.” Thom Yorke, his bandmate in Atoms for Peace, sings on “Traffic Lights.” The title honors Flea’s great-great-grandmother, whose story of poverty in Ireland and emigration to Australia shaped the album.
When “Traffic Lights” came out in January, he wrote on Instagram that he hoped the song could “ease burdens, sway hips and bring people together.” Cave, for his part, called his session “a beautiful conversation between Flea’s trumpet and my voice.”
Critics were warm without being rapturous: a weighted average of 14 critic reviews put the album at 75 out of 100. It topped the jazz and blues album charts in the UK and Australia and reached No. 2 on the US jazz albums chart.
Live, and back with the band
The May run included a Tiny Desk concert filmed the day after his show at the Black Cat in Washington, D.C., where he played trumpet and bass and recited poetry with guitarist Jeff Parker, Johnson, bassist Anna Butterss and drummer Deantoni Parks. “I’m just one part of this ensemble,” he said there.
The Chili Peppers have not released a studio album since 2022, when Unlimited Love and Return of the Dream Canteen came out months apart. In February Flea said the band had been “writing music together, recording at John Frusciante’s house,” for what would be their 14th studio album. No title or release date has been announced, so the next concrete milestone for fans is any official word from the band on that record.
Further reading
Image: Clare Cridland, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
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