Flea has a jazz band now, and it just played North Sea Jazz

Quick question: did you know that Flea, yes, that Flea, has his own band? Not a side project on paper, a real, touring, chart-topping band. On Saturday night, 11 July, Flea and the Honora Band played the Maas stage at the 50th edition of North Sea Jazz in Rotterdam, and for most of the set the wildest bassist in rock was not holding a bass. He was playing trumpet.

And no, the Red Hot Chili Peppers have not stopped. The band is touring through 2026 with the classic lineup intact. This is Flea running two lives at once: stadiums with the Chili Peppers, jazz rooms with a band of his own.

The Honora Band exists because of Honora, Flea's first solo album, released this March on Nonesuch and named the number one new jazz album in the UK, France and Germany, the first chart entry of his career under his own name. The record goes back to his actual first love: before rock music ever entered his life, the young Flea adored Miles Davis, Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie and played trumpet, not bass. The album mixes six originals with covers (including a version of Frank Ocean's "Thinkin Bout You"), Thom Yorke and Nick Cave drop in as guest voices, and saxophonist Josh Johnson produced it. The band is young, too: it played its first-ever show on 7 May at Thalia Hall in Chicago, and has been on a sold-out run through intimate venues in North America and Europe since, with Newport Jazz still ahead this summer. Johnson on sax and electronics, Jeff Parker on guitar, Anna Butterss on bass, Deantoni Parks on drums. Serious improvisers, all of them.

Critics who caught the tour's opening night praised exactly that willingness to start over. The Chicago Tribune called it "an inspiring show from a student who just happens to be a Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee," and closed with: "We should all aspire to be so bold."

And the timing could not be better: NPR published the band's Tiny Desk Concert today. The night before the taping, at a club show in Washington, D.C., Flea called performing with a jazz band "an adventure." Twenty-one minutes, judge for yourself.

I saw the Red Hot Chili Peppers at Pinkpop in 2006, twenty years ago, and the one I could not stop watching was Flea. The skills, the energy, the way he seemed to be playing three concerts at once inside one set. Long before I ever held a camera in a photo pit, that was the kind of performer that taught me what a live show could be. So the idea of that same musician at 63, standing in a jazz hall in Rotterdam playing the trumpet lines of his childhood heroes, on his own songs, on his own terms: that is one of the better stories live music has told this year.