HONORA

MOTHER EARTH IS PREGNANT FOR THE THIRD TIME FOR Y'ALL HAVE KNOCKED HER UP I HAVE TASTED THE MAGGOTS IN THE MIND OF THE UNIVERSE I WAS NOT OFFENDED FOR I KNEW I HAD TO RISE ABOVE IT ALL OR DROWN IN MY OWN SHIT

THE VISIONARY - FLEA - BUILD A BRIDGE, ITS WHERE THE COURAGE IS Text and Photography BARTOLOMEO CELESTINO

A protagonist is not necessarily the loudest figure in the frame, nor the one positioned at its centre, but the force around which energy reorganises itself. Flea has always occupied this rarer category of presence. To watch him perform is to witness motion before meaning, instinct before structure, a kind of physical thinking where the body arrives at truth faster than language. Across decades of cultural noise and reinvention, he has remained a figure of restless velocity: feral, precise, improbably lyrical.

Some days arrive with a quiet sense of improbability. Flea, relaxed yet electrically present, wearing a Lakers purple Issey Miyake cap, gestures toward the oversized chair at the front of the room and says, almost mischievously, “take the king chair.” The invitation carries theatre, but I decline the implied spotlight, drifting instead toward something deeper, a chair designed less for posture than for surrender. The kind you can disappear into, eyes closed. The kind that permits listening rather than observing. He kneels by the mixer with casual familiarity and plugs his iPhone into the jack, but before the music begins he speaks about the horn with the ease of someone describing a lifelong attachment rather than an adopted instrument. The hours of practice, the years of devotion. Playing trumpet, he reminds me, was never an experiment or late career diversion. It was the original impulse, the earliest fixation. Years earlier, over Sri Lankan noodles in Darlinghurst during one of his Sydney visits, we had circled this very subject. The conversation moved instinctively through names that once formed my own private mythology: Miles, Wes, Thelonious, Milt, Dizzy, Bird, Coltrane. The catalogue felt endless, almost chaotic, stirring something long dormant. In the early 90s, I hauled jazz records back to Australia from obsessive overseas hunts in New York to Paris, sleeves worn, luggage overweight, long before suitcases obediently rolled on tiny wheels. Many of those albums went straight to my brother, destined for sampling sessions on his small Akai MPC. Back then, I believed sound itself could alter internal weather. Sitting in that room, the memory returned with unexpected clarity. Now here we were. With gratitude to Flea and special thanks to Stephen Pavlovic. Also in attendance, Legs, Giovanni and Enrico Paradiso. Honora does not present as a stylistic deviation but as a return of gravitational force. The album’s architecture is anchored in Flea’s enduring relationship with jazz and the trumpet, the instrument that predated the punk kid, and, in many ways, foretold his musical identity. He described the project with revealing directness: time and space, he says, finally allowed him to reconnect with his first musical loves, jazz and the trumpet. The phrasing resists the rhetoric of reinvention. This is not departure. It is re alignment. That sensibility is inseparable from his formative encounters with jazz, which he recalls not as influence but revelation: “It was the greatest thing I ever saw. The wildness, warmth … straight bebop … I knew there were higher things on this earth.” The statement reads less like nostalgia than recognition, as though the horn represented a vocabulary of feeling that existed long before career, genre, or mythology intervened. Within Honora, (who’s cover features his mother in law) that early language resurfaces with remarkable coherence. The trumpet is not positioned as colour or accent but as a primary expressive conduit, shaping the album’s emotional and spatial logic. As the album begins, the sound of his trumpet fills the room with surprising physicality. Not aggressive or declarative, but enveloping. The record’s defining characteristic is its commitment to atmosphere. Only days earlier, I had driven to Melbourne with the opening track, A Plea, looping for hours, its mood refusing to exhaust itself. The music advances through patience, negative space, and tonal liquidity rather than density or virtuosity. The trumpet reframes Flea’s presence entirely. The instrument carries breath, fragility, and restraint, qualities that stand in deliberate contrast to the explosive muscularity associated with his bass work. Listening becomes immersive. The room seems to dilate

The album’s interpretative centre becomes most vivid in its reimagining of works such as Maggot Brain and Wichita Lineman. These pieces arrive with deeply embedded cultural memory, yet Honora treats them not as monuments but as open terrain. Maggot Brain, historically saturated with emotional weight, unfolds here as an exercise in suspended time. The performance privileges drift, texture, and tonal atmosphere, allowing the composition’s core emotional thesis, isolation, vulnerability, interior vastness... to expand rather than intensify. Psychedelia emerges as structure rather than effect, the music feeling unmoored, guided by sensation and space. Nick Caves vocals on Wichita Lineman undergoes an equally striking transformation. Its melodic framework remains recognisable, but its emotional delivery diffuses into something prismatic and dreamlike. Familiar longing softens into a luminous haze, subtly destabilising expectation. Narrative clarity gives way to mood, to feeling, to perception itself. The song is not revisited. It is re experienced. What unifies these interpretations is their refusal of conventional homage. There is no overt display of virtuosity, no theatrical reinvention. Instead, Flea and the ensemble lean into elasticity, tonal ambiguity, and spatial awareness. Psychedelia is articulated through pacing, timbre, and interaction, aligning seamlessly with jazz’s improvisational ethos while preserving the emotional DNA of the source material. Even the inclusion of Frank Ocean’s ‘Thinkin Bout You’ extends this logic, dissolving boundaries between repertoires and eras. The listener encounters altered conditions rather than altered compositions. Honora ultimately registers as an introspective document, a recalibration of artistic centre rather than an expansion of brand identity. It reveals continuity with Flea’s earliest impulses, the trumpet functioning as both origin point and emotional anchor. Before leaving, his wife steps quietly into the room with their small child. I ask for a photograph. “With me?” Flea replies instinctively. No, just of you. The answer lands with visible relief. The camera flashes the room, and as the light dims the dominant impression is not of a genre shift, but coherence: an artist returning to foundational language, where expression precedes expectation and sound itself becomes a form of memory. Equally striking is the quiet humility embedded within the record’s construction. Honora subtly reframes the mythology surrounding Flea by foregrounding process rather than persona. The presence of his bass teacher within the ensemble becomes symbolically potent, suggesting that artistic evolution does not plateau with success or recognition. Even a musician so firmly established remains engaged in study, refinement, and perpetual recalibration. The gesture aligns seamlessly with jazz itself, a tradition defined by continuous learning, listening, and exchange. Expertise, the album implies, is not a fixed state but an ongoing practice. This sensibility permeates the music. There is no sense of arrival, only exploration. The performances carry a searching quality, as though each phrase is being discovered rather than executed from certainty. Honora does not communicate virtuosity as dominance, but as attentiveness. It honours the idea that musicianship, at its most vital, is inseparable from vulnerability. What remains after the final notes fade is a feeling of rare coherence: an artist returning not to reclaim the past, but to reinhabit the instincts that first compelled him toward sound. Honora becomes less a statement of identity than an affirmation of becoming. The point is never to arrive, only to keep listening, keep playing, keep moving toward whatever still feels alive. And alive he is, after locking himself away with an 808 drum machine and a trumpet, removing everything nonessential, reducing the process to breath, rhythm, instinct. Then bringing his friends (Thom Yorke and Warren Ellis get a guernsey too) in with no spectacle, no noise, just the raw mechanics of their shared sound and curiosity. What emerged is discovery, tones that drift, pulse, and glow with an almost weightless intimacy. It is the quiet alchemy Honora embodies, a musician returning not to prove anything, but to listen, to search, to feel. Or, as Coltrane so precisely articulated, “You can play a shoestring if you’re sincere.”