Flea was a jazz kid, then a punk kid, then a whatever the Red Hot Chili Peppers were throughout all their iterations guy, and now he’s picked up the trumpet again.
And, he’s good. Real good. Not surprising, but still impressive just how good he is.
Questlove asked him about this extremely roundabout trip to coming back to trumpet at this phase of his life and one part of his answer really made me smile.
Flea doesn’t see the current generation of jazz musicians as being elitists.
When he was a kid, it was all about elitism. His step dad was a player. His friends would come over and they’d all jam and play stuff like “Cherokee” as fast as you can’t even imagine. That was the tops. That was the level where, if you could hang, you could look down on everyone else from.
"When I was a kid and my stepdad would have these guys over and they'd play standards and play bebop and throw down. It was always like in my head that's like the high point. And like, my dream is to be able to sit in with any jazz dudes and just throw down on the horn.”
Young Flea wanted to be up there, too. But life, and punk shows, and other stuff entered the equation. It put him internally and externally at a cross roads.
He drifted away and found his own success. And it was real success. New elites in a new alt-rock genre status achieved. All on bass. No regrets it’s just the way it unfolded. Like one door was closed off and another one opened. He ran out and ran off and still won.
Part of what never left him was the tension. He evolved. His friends, the ones who saw the world a little bit more like him, where everything was fair game, they were growing up too. Even though they reached heights (in charts and festival audiences, etc.), they didn’t look down on others from a point of self-possessed mastery like the old heads.
"I think one of the things that I really relate to them about is they're embracing all of music. Like the jazz guys that I grew up with, they really looked down on rock, they looked down on pop music. You know, they were just like this like they can't play. This is about like haircuts and fashion. Like they don't know their shit, they can't blow changes... And then seeing this new generation that you can tell they embrace hip-hop, they embrace youth culture, it's all beautiful to them."
A few years back, when more of the jazz greats were gone and the new kids were rising up with greater and greater numbers, Flea noticed a change. Then he heard Kamasi Washington and knew the change was real.
"When I heard Kamasi's record, I was like, that's that feeling of the street, that revolutionary spirit, that spirituality, that togetherness that I want."
He picked the trumpet back up. He started practicing everyday. He started thinking, if the people now get it, that you don’t have to look down on anything, that it’s all music and energy and love, there was a space for him to be himself now.
I was a Chili Peppers fan as a kid. I was the person who loved all the different music, realized I didn’t have the chops or the practice habits to make it in the jazz (or other worlds, musically), and yet, it doesn’t change how much I love any of these things. The love is what the love is.
You can love The Circle Jerks and The Germs and Miles Davis and Sly Stone and… why not? Me too, man, me too.
Hearing Flea tell the stories, and knowing the caliber of the music he’s making with The Honora Band, makes me so happy.
We change, we grow, we love what we love and the most important thing for us to do is love it.
