Flea, photo by Gus Van Sant

Every Friday, Relix surveys the wealth of new music released over the past seven days and selects standouts for the Relix Staff Picks playlist. Read on for the highlights from this week’s batch, presented by Qobuz: experience the difference with high-quality music streaming and human-curated selections from the platform that puts artists first.

Before he picked up the bass at 16 to join what would become the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Flea’s first love was jazz trumpet. All these years later, his imagining of music’s evocative power remains inextricably rooted in his first encounter with the tradition as a child, watching on in wonder when family friends communed in his living room for impromptu performances.

“It was the greatest thing I ever saw,” he recalls. “The wildness, warmth and we of it. Straight Bebop. Boom. I knew there were higher things on this earth, way above the pettiness that had left me disheartened.”

As he neared his 60th birthday, the iconic bassist reckoned with the fact that the trumpet-based project he’d long aspired to create – “an instrumental record with deep hypnotic grooves, trippy melodies layered on top, meditations on a groove” – would never come to pass if he couldn’t commit to it in the present. Having forestalled the concept to train on the horn since 1991, he snapped into action with a definite charge: after two years of daily practice, he’d lay down an honest, vulnerable record of his ideas and abilities. Today, he shared that vision with Honora.

On his solo debut, Flea navigates kinetic jazz atmospheres at the helm of an all-star ensemble. Beyond his lead horn, lithe, fiery, wistful and full-bodied, he composed every song (save for reinventions of Funkadelic’s “Maggot Brain,” Glen Campbell’s “Wichita Lineman” and Frank Ocean’s “Thinkin Bout You”), arranged the album and plays bass throughout. The elite team alongside him includes producer and saxophonist Josh Johnson, Tortoise guitarist Jeff Parker, saxophonist Rickey Washington (Kamasi’s father), drummer Deantoni Sparks, trombonist Vikram Devasthali, bassist Anna Butterss and vocalist Chris Warren, plus Nick Cave, Bright Eyes’ Nate Walcott and his Atoms for Peace bandmates Mauro Refosco and Thom Yorke. “They were all the most genuinely supportive people, moving me deeply and daily with their generous spirits,” he reflected:

“Sitting in a room and playing the music with them made me feel like I was on drugs. I was buzzing, tripping and floating around the studio. I love them, they truly gave of themselves. I bow all the way down.”

Flea’s isn’t the only project challenging jazz’s boundaries. Irreversible Entanglements’ sixth studio album, Future Present Past, gathers as a storm as the experimentalist collective swings wildly through ebullience, outrage, solemnity and enlightenment. Camae Ayewa (aka Moor Mother) recites urgent poetry at the fore, and Helado Negro and MOTHERBOARD contribute across the record. On the other end of the spectrum are Parlor Greens, the powerhouse organ trio of guitarist Jimmy James, drummer Tim Carman and Hammond ace Adam Scone. While informed by their soul-jazz ancestors, their sophomore offering, Emeralds, is never nostalgic, instead divining new possibilities in a time-honored sound with tight pocket work and heavy melodies.

Today also brings the long-awaited return of Courtney Barnett with Creature of Habit, her follow-up to 2022’s Things Take Time, Take Time. The Australian indie forerunner channels a torrent of questions about her life and future in honeyed, melancholic soft rock metamorphoses, magnifying minute happenings into unshakable feelings and insights worth keeping. “This album is all about change,” Barnett says. “It’s in the lyrics, it’s in the ideas, I can’t avoid it. It’s about embracing change, but also grieving the things that have changed – the chaos and confusion of all of those feelings.”

The latest batch of Relix Staff Picks also includes new music from Paul McCartney, Yonder Mountain String Band, Tom Misch, Jose Gonzalez, MEMORIALS, Jah Wobble, King Tuff, The Young Fresh Fellows, Kendra Morris, Myriad & JJ Whitefield and many more gems. Tune in here.