When André 3000 released New Blue Sun in 2023, an album of flute-led ambient music that contained no rapping and no verses and no concession to his existing audience, the conversation it generated was almost entirely about him and almost nothing about the album itself. The question was not whether the music was good. The question was what it meant for a musician of his stature to do this, to step out of the form that made him famous and into something older and quieter and harder to sell.

Flea is now doing something similar with Honora, his debut jazz trumpet record released this week. And his arrival at this moment forces the question that has been lurking underneath both stories: when a rock musician turns to jazz, what exactly is happening?

The easy dismissal is that it is midlife crisis dressed up as artistic evolution. The successful musician reaches a certain age, looks at what they have built, and decides the most interesting thing they can do is go back to school. Jazz becomes the genre equivalent of buying a farmhouse. This reading is satisfying in its cynicism and wrong in almost every particular.

The more accurate picture has to do with what jazz actually is for people who grow up hearing it before they understand it. Flea was eight years old when his stepfather and a few friends improvised around “Cherokee” in the family home. He has described the experience as transformative in a way that predates everything that came afterward, including the Chili Peppers, including the stadium tours, including the decades of being one of the most technically celebrated rock bassists alive. The trumpet was the first musical object he loved. Everything else came later.

André 3000 has talked about his relationship to the flute in terms that parallel this. He was not picking up an instrument because he was bored with rap. He was following something back to a place that had always been there, obscured by the trajectory his career took.

This pattern is old enough to have a history. Miles Davis spent time absorbing what rock was doing in the late 1960s and came out the other side with Bitches Brew. John Coltrane’s whole career was an argument against staying in one place. The movement between genre and tradition and experiment is not peculiar to rock musicians finding jazz. It is what happens when serious musicians get older and feel the particular pull of the thing they almost didn’t do.

What distinguishes the current moment is the degree to which this kind of move has become legible to a general audience. When Flea releases a jazz record, it is covered by outlets that would not normally engage with jazz. The audience following the story may not follow it all the way to the music, but the conversation exists in spaces it would not have occupied twenty years ago. Jazz, after decades of being treated as the genre that died somewhere between the 1950s and the 1980s, is present enough in the cultural conversation that a rock musician moving toward it is news rather than eccentricity.

That shift has something to do with Kamasi Washington, whose arrival in 2015 with The Epic repositioned jazz as something that could be epic and overwhelming and emotional in the way that rock and hip-hop fans understood those things to be. It has something to do with the current generation of jazz musicians, particularly in Los Angeles and New York and London, who treat genre as a resource rather than a constraint. And it has something to do with streaming economics, which stripped away the retail categories that used to determine what you were allowed to listen to.

When Flea worked with Rickey Washington to prepare for Honora, he was entering a lineage that connects directly to Kamasi Washington’s career, to Blue Note’s current output, to the Los Angeles scene that has been one of the most generative in jazz for the last decade. He did not turn to jazz because he was exhausted with rock. He turned toward it because it was always pulling.

André 3000 and Flea are interesting cases precisely because they are not fringe figures who have nothing to lose. They are musicians who built massive careers in other genres and then chose, at points of maximum security, to do the thing that could not be justified by commercial logic. That choice is worth taking seriously. The music they made as a result is worth listening to. And the pattern they fit is worth understanding, because it is likely to continue. Musicians who have already proved themselves in one form and are no longer in the business of proving themselves tend to eventually find their way back to the earliest, most unresolved love.

Jazz has been the destination more than once. It will be again.