Three years after EXCELSIOR, Jasper Marsalis has re-emerged as Slauson Malone 1 with his first new recording. The choice is not an original track but a cover of Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Porcelain,” a deep cut from Californication that already sits apart from the band’s usual register.
Marsalis strips the song down further. The original’s soft, slow structure remains, but the cover moves into a more disquieting territory. His voice is processed to make its fragility explicit, hovering over a minimal arrangement. He sings the opening lines, “Porcelain / Are you wasting away in your skin? / Are you missing the love of your kin? / Drifting and floating and fading away,” and the repetition holds a more unsettled weight than the Chili Peppers’ version.
The result is less a tribute than a reframing. Where the original could pass as a tender anomaly in the band’s catalog, this version lands closer to the kind of fractured introspection that has defined Marsalis’s own work. Returning through someone else’s song lets him gesture at absence and distance without stating it directly. It is a small release, but it carries the same deliberate unease as his previous material.
