Jeff Parker: Right.
Flea: Yeah, I know the feeling. Most of the musicians that I played with when I started playing bass were not educated like you guys are. With the Fishbone guys and my friends, we’d have jams every Monday or Tuesday at these clubs, and it was always really fun, but even in this different context, it was the same shit. Someone would play something that, for some reason, wasn’t hip, and they’re not invited back up or they get snubbed to the side.
Was there a time in your life where you felt like you found your identity as a player?
Jeff Parker: Yeah, for sure. Well, two situations. One, when I started to really compose, write my own music, and think about the context that I wanted to hear my sound in. Once those ideas started to become original to me, then my playing started to become more original.
I also had mentors. One of my biggest ones was a tenor saxophonist named Fred Anderson, who’s one of the founders of the AACM, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, which is a musicians collective in Chicago that came out of the Black Liberation Movement of the ’60s, founded in 1965. I played with him a lot and he died probably 15 years ago or so. I was really flattered that he even asked me to join his group. Fred was a really powerful improviser — energetic but also pretty introspective. You could tell there was a lot of intention behind everything that he played. When I would play, he could hear me thinking and struggling and second-guessing myself. One day he was like, “Jeff, you just got to trust your instincts.” And from then on, it took a weight off of me and I was able to really just be myself.
Flea: Music is wild like that. I had the good fortune to play with Ornette [Coleman]. I did four or five concerts with him.
Jeff Parker: Wow. Oh, man.
Flea: He invited me. It was so cool, and I was terrified. Like I say, I just love music and I love to play bass, but I’m terrified of jazz. It’s what I grew up with. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a jazz trumpet player, but I’d look at all the chords in a Charlie Parker song like, “Oh, those fucking chords, they change every two beats. And what do the lines through it mean? How do you know what to do?” And I was so scared. And so his son, Denardo, sent me all this music, like we’re going to play these tunes. And I practiced, but I knew that they all understood this complex language that I’m baffled and bewildered and terrified by. And I showed up to do the first show and Ornette wasn’t there yet. I was jamming with the drummer, and I think he had another bass player, and [Coleman] walked up and he goes, “You sound great. Just play whatever you feel.” Right in that second, I was like, “Ahhhhh…” Once I got inside it and was listening and playing and I found my way, it felt fun and free. I felt like I had something to offer.
