“The greatest record ever made”, according to Flea
Just because you make good music, doesn’t mean you have to really love it. There are plenty of members of very famous bands who simply clock in, do their thing, and leave again. From day one, Flea has prided himself on being an eclectic fan of all types of music. It has filtered into his work and made him one of the most dynamic bassists of all time.
Even though he predominantly makes funk rock with Red Hot Chili Peppers, any cursory glance at his resume will let any music fan know how diverse his taste is, working with everyone from Young MC to the Thom Yorke solo venture Atoms for Peace. Then again, the record that Flea calls the greatest of all time is still a bit further than traditional rock and roll.
When picking up the bass, Flea didn’t even gravitate towards traditional rock initially. Loving the sounds that he heard out of old-school punk rock, the bass player’s first stint in a mainstream group was the hardcore punk band Fear before joining his buddy Anthony Kiedis to form the basis of Red Hot Chili Peppers.
From there, Flea started incorporating every influence he could into his music, from Sly and the Family Stone to Sex Pistols to Neil Young. When deciphering the work of Flea, it is easy to hear all of these influences work through his fingers and into his strings. Whether it is a pounding bounce or a more menacing noodle up the fretboard. Although all those artists might fit nicely under the rock umbrella, Flea’s love of jazz has been with him since his youth.
Before picking up a guitar, Flea was aspiring to be a horn player, starting on the trumpet trying to emulate the jazz records that he heard around the house. Although artists like Wayne Shorter rank high among his all-time favourite artists, the sounds of Miles Davis stole Flea’s heart on Kind of Blue.
Deep within his cool jazz period, Davis started incorporating modal writing into his music on this record, featuring drastic changes in key that sound completely natural on tracks like ‘So What’. When talking about his first musical loves, Flea still thinks that Davis is untouchable, telling Ameoba, “I think it’s the greatest record ever made. It has everything you could ever want. It has violence, it has deep poetic love. This is the one record in my life that I have listened to more than any other record”.
The album is a flawless masterpiece. No matter your feelings toward the genre of jazz, this record ranks among one of the finest ever made. In fact, I would bet, if you hate jazz, then this will be the LP to help soften your stance, so rich in artistic texture and smooth groove, that it is punctuated neatly with musical passion so intense it will make the staunchest enemy into a friend by the end of the first play.
Thinking that he would go on to make his living with a trumpet, Flea recalled spending hours trying to emulate Davis’ solos and pitch, self-admittedly butchering them in the process. While the notes may not have always been correct, that level of practice helped build the framework for what Flea would do in his funk-rock outfit.
Across projects like Blood Sugar Sex Magik, Flea carried the same ideals that Davis had during the Kind of Blue. Although the musical language may have been different, the spontaneity from songs like ‘Funky Monks’ and ‘The Power of Equality’ feel like extensions of what Davis would have played in such a setting, only transposed to the bass guitar instead of a trumpet.
That freedom of expression in Davis’s work would grow even further in Bitches Brew, becoming a cornerstone between rock and jazz that no one else equalled. Even though most musicians tend to draw a line between the different genres of music they love, Flea never sees walls between different styles. It’s all music at the end of the day, and the building blocks of harmony can cross any genre boundary.
