London, UK · funk · acid-jazz

Jamiroquai

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Space-cowboy funk in a feathered headdress — 'Virtual Insanity' grooves that never stopped moving.

Jamiroquai formed in London in 1992 around singer Jay Kay, emerging from the city's acid jazz scene alongside contemporaries like the Brand New Heavies. The band's name combines "jam" with a variation on the Iroquois confederacy. Early members included didgeridoo player Wallis Buchanan, keyboardist and co-writer Toby Smith, and bassist Stuart Zender, who joined by audition.

The group's music combines funk and disco grooves with jazz-inflected keyboards, live bass and Kay's falsetto, later records folding in house and electronic production. Lyrically the band has often addressed social and environmental issues, a thread running from their earliest singles onward.

Their videos and Kay's oversized headwear became part of the band's public image, particularly the single 'Virtual Insanity', whose video was named Video of the Year at the 1997 MTV Video Music Awards. The song also earned the band a Grammy Award the following year.

Three Jamiroquai albums have topped the UK chart: Emergency on Planet Earth, Synkronized and A Funk Odyssey, alongside the number-one single 'Deeper Underground'. The band were the third-best-selling UK act of the 1990s behind the Spice Girls and Oasis, and had sold more than 26 million albums worldwide by 2017. Travelling Without Moving holds a Guinness World Record as the best-selling funk album ever made.

Across three decades the line-up has shifted considerably around Kay, but the band has remained a live proposition built on a large ensemble, with horn and keyboard parts played rather than sequenced, a deliberate contrast to the electronic music their records sometimes reference.

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funkacid-jazz