David Bowie Loved Booker Little, and Other Flea Takeaways; Plus Big Ears Acknowledgements

Up front, I want to quickly acknowledge that I had an amazing time at Big Ears. I’d heard many friends’ and fellow writers’ prior accounts of the cornucopia of music and camaraderie that is the annual inter-genre Knoxville fest, but I had no idea how wonderful it would feel to fully immerse in the sounds and the hang for a few blissful spring days.

I shared some photos and acknowledgements over on Instagram, in two parts, but I’d like to reiterate my gratitude to the festival team (particularly Ashley Capps, Bryan Crow and Shelby Sandlin), as well as Matt Merewitz, for making my visit possible. I’ve dreamed for years of attending and participating, and it was an honor to host a panel in conjunction with the John Zorn residency that took over the Bijou Theatre Friday and Saturday.

Here’s a little memento:

Another huge thanks to the four brilliant artists who joined me for the conversation: John Medeski (who’d been onstage into the wee hours the night before with Billy Martin, Scott Metzger and Nels Cline), Jorge Roeder, Dave Lombardo and Barbara Hannigan. As I did while reporting the 2020 Rolling Stone feature that inspired the panel, I had a great time chatting with all of them about the ways that Zorn has inspired and challenged them, and expanded their creative horizons.

Speaking for myself, the conversation added an extra layer of richness to all the Zorn performances I witnessed throughout the weekend, featuring these four and many others. In particular, the Cobra set, which included Medeski, Roeder and Lombardo, and the first “Hannigan Sings Zorn” set (with Stephen Gosling on piano) really drove home what a vast and diverse creative universe Zorn has fostered during the past 40-plus years.

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I also wanted to share a few outtakes from my recent New York Times feature on the making of Honora, the new solo debut by Flea. Up front, here’s a live rendition of what may be my favorite track from the record, an instrumental version of Frank Ocean’s indelible “Thinkin’ ’Bout You.”

The first is a brief tidbit that Flea mentioned when I brought up Booker Little in our conversation (as I’m wont to do!). We were discussing his various influences and inspirations on trumpet — as he notes in the piece, Clifford Brown is a biggie — and, remembering that I had seen Flea tweet about Little in the past, I floated the name. Here’s what he told me:

I love Booker Little — my son’s middle name is Booker. What he did with Eric Dolphy and his record Out Front… John Frusciante, a while ago, sent me a track that Booker Little played on, this beautiful ballad that I’d never heard before — I can’t remember what it is. But anyways, I guess he was a real acolyte of Clifford Brown’s and really took it in a different way and also died really young. You think of him and Clifford, these guys that did this monumental, history-making, defining music that will just live forever at such a young age. It’s unbelievable. I think about my capabilities at that age — I was trying to figure out where to get an ounce of weed, you know what I mean? [Laughs]

And yeah, I had kind of a light friendship with David Bowie — someone I really admired growing up and always will admire; I love his records and him as a person so much. But the friendship that I developed with him was based around a love of Booker Little. He loved Booker Little. He loved jazz, but Booker Little was his favorite and he’d always write to me about how much Booker Little touched his heart. So Booker Little I think is very beloved musician.

The second is a thread that emerged when talking to the various members of Honora’s supporting cast, which, as many jazz-savvy listeners know, draws heavily on the vanguard of the contemporary L.A. scene, including three out of four members of guitarist Jeff Parker’s justly celebrated ETA IVtet — who will put out their own new record next month — and two from the excellent SML, profiled in the Times by Grayson Haver Currin back in November. (I missed SML at Big Ears but caught them at Brooklyn’s Sultan Room back in December and was totally absorbed.)

All three of these musicians — Parker, bassist Anna Butterss and multi-instrumentalist Josh Johnson, the album’s producer, who will be on tour with Flea next month — spoke highly of him and the Honora experience. But interestingly, they each mentioned independently that, prior to working on the record, they had very little history with the band that made him world-famous.

Here’s Butterss:

Honestly, [Flea] wasn’t super on my radar. I did not grow up listening to any kind of popular music. I had heard of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, but I don’t think I’d heard any of their music. I knew who Flea was as, like, a public bass player, and I’ve always had a sense of respect for him just from how he shows up in the world and how he talks about music.

But I’d never really listened to anything until — it must have been about 2017. Our friend Nate Walcott [ed. note: a multi-instrumentalist and another member of the Honora cast] was touring with the Chili Peppers. Nate asked if we wanted to come and see them play at Staples Center. And Josh and I went. I think Jeff might have gone too, and that was the first time I’d seen them play, and I was like, “This is crazy. This is really different.” I hadn’t been in that world at all, really. It was actually probably the biggest show I’d ever seen.

Johnson, who, prior to Honora, played on the Chili Peppers’ dual 2022 albums, Unlimited Love and Return of the Dream Canteen, gave a similar account:

As a person of my age in the United States, it’s impossible to have not heard the Chili Peppers. [Laughs] I knew their music through hearing it places. It wasn’t a big part of me coming up, or anything like that, but always an awareness of them.

And here’s Parker:

I of course knew of the Red Hot Chili Peppers and knew their music from just the hits that were everywhere you went.

And I was aware of [Flea]. We actually had both played together — not at the same time — but we’re both on a Joshua Redman called Momentum, and that’s actually how I had introduced myself to him. Our kids used to go to the same school. My son was in elementary school and his daughter was in the junior high, and I saw him at a school event, and, you know, he’s Flea, man: He’s iconic; he’s a rock star. So I kind of walked up to him, and I could kind of see him start to be like, “What’s up?” [Laughs] And I was like, “Hey, man, we’re both on a Joshua Redman album.” And then he was like, “Oh, OK, man, how you doing? What’s your name?”

And from then we were pretty friendly, and we actually had some people in common that we knew. Nate Walcott was at the time touring as an auxiliary member of the Red Hot Chili Peppers. And I knew Nate a little bit from Chicago and then got to know him more, just through the improv, jazz community in L.A. When I had the steady gig at ETA, he would be there a lot of Mondays.

But honestly, I’m of the generation — I didn’t really come up with the Red Hot Chili Peppers. I think that was people who were much younger than me. I’m a little bit younger than Flea, so by the time those guys were ascending, I was in jazz school and I wasn’t listening to that stuff, man. I was into Miles and Trane and Sonny Rollins.

And lastly, Parker said something else that struck me, about the aesthetic that he and this cohort of musicians have been cultivating in recent years, an M.O. that Flea clearly appreciated and channeled for his own project:

I also know that he dug the record Suite for Max Brown. That was the first thing that I saw he posted about on Instagram. And he’s talked about it: being musically proficient, but not kind of wearing it on your sleeve. The thing is, you’re trying to just make music and relate to people and not be flashy and show off.

I think maybe he could see how his style could fit into what we were doing. Because there’s a lot of different musical scenes in L.A. There’s a lot of people doing all kinds of amazing things here, and what we do, the space that we exploit, is kind of a part of it. When we were at ETA playing with that group, we definitely were exploring these static spaces. … A lot of our music was more about really exploring a flatter kind of landscape, as opposed to things being very, kind of, peaks and valleys.

This “static spaces” aesthetic Parker describes seems like a driving ethos for a certain wing of jazz during the past decade or so — not just the ETA IVtet and SML but also the larger universe around their shared label, International Anthem, which made major waves earlier on with releases by Makaya McCraven and others. And it’s important to note that all of this music that has brought many new listeners into the fold.

There’s obviously room for overt virtuosity in the contemporary jazz scene too (hello, Steve Lehman, to name just one example!), but having been in these rooms when SML, Parker’s quartet, McCraven and other kindred spirits like Brandee Younger are playing, you can see how much contemporary audiences are responding to a more vibe-based, collectively driven way of making music — less focused on a progression of solos and more on setting and sustaining a groove, and along with it, a mood. (I think a parallel can also be drawn to the Tyshawn Sorey Trio I raved about here.)

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OK, that’s what I’ve got for you this time around. Hope you enjoyed these outtakes and impressions — I’m thinking of making a habit out of publishing these sorts of auxiliary posts after a given feature goes live, so if this is something you’d like to see more of, let me know in the comments!

Thanks very much for reading.