Jamiroquai

But at the end of the day, what exactly was this acid jazz thing? With hindsight, it's fair to admit it was little more than a marketing category. Emerging in the late Eighties — largely thanks to the promotional efforts of radio DJ Gilles Peterson on the BBC — the term was used to drum up attention around a decidedly heterogeneous body of music for which plenty of other labels would have worked just as well. Nu soul with too many instrumental parts to pass as R&B, hip-hop with jazzy backing tracks, dance music with a funky feel but a touch too slow — and at the same time too brisk to convincingly land in the downtempo catch-all. And then there was full-on fusion — but heaven forbid you call it that: straddling the turn of the Nineties, that word alone would have written off the whole genre as stale. Slap a new, cool name on it, though, and suddenly it's a different story altogether.

Peterson even started a record label built for the purpose, inevitably named Acid Jazz Records. It put out records by Galliano and the phenomenal Hammond organ player James Taylor, along with now largely forgotten funk revivalists like Mother Earth and Corduroy. And, above all, Brand New Heavies, who with the kaleidoscopic funk of their debut album became the first of the pack to break into the charts, in 1990.

From there, the new label took hold. Its rise can be traced through the archives of British magazines like NME and Melody Maker, following its association with a truly eclectic array of projects: Us3, Guru, Digable Planets, MC Solaar, Young Disciples, Incognito, United Future Organisation, Outside, D*Note, St Germain, even Portishead. There's one name, though, that from its very first single and its earliest live shows around London in early 1993 captured the media spotlight and caught the ear of listeners who, until then, had never had much interest in acid jazz — or perhaps jazz at all. That's Jamiroquai, the band founded just a year earlier by the twenty-three-year-old singer and songwriter Jay Kay, born Jason Luís Cheetham.

At the time "When You Gonna Learn", the band's first recorded track, was written, the group didn't actually exist yet. There was just him, Jay Kay, with his B♭2-G♯5 range more suited to hard rock tenors — though far more inclined toward soul smoothness — and there was a very specific feel in his head: not the stereotyped sound producers kept trying to foist on him by copying whatever was charting at the time, but a richer, funkier, smoother groove. "Dexter Wansel, Earth Wind & Fire, and tracks like Johnny Hammond's 'Los Conquistadores Chocolate'" is how the liner notes of the debut album's reissue tell it. In the end, Jay Kay got his band and a deal with Sony, who immediately released "When You Gonna Learn" on CD (the 12-inch came out on Acid Jazz Records instead). The debut album, "Emergency On Planet Earth", followed in June 1993 and shot to number one in the UK charts. But that was only the beginning.

"The Return Of The Space Cowboy" was ready by October 1994 and marks a clear shift in artistic direction. The band had been reshuffled: less big-band emphasis, less reliance on session players, and a decidedly tighter sound. Even the drummer had been swapped out, with Derrick McKenzie stepping in and staying put from then on. Right from the start, opener "Just Another Story" makes it clear the stakes have been raised. The instrumental intro, with a broken theme on synth and Rhodes, sounds like it's lifted the melodic secret of the most memorable Weather Report, and soon starts rippling out into slapped bass bounces, enveloping pads, and drumming that's restrained but infectiously funky. Restrained for now, that is, because after a silent break and a new theme in the low octaves — if anything even more incisive than the first — something in the rhythm starts to shift, growing more urgent, pushing harder and harder. As Jay Kay's voice moves freely between scat, near-hip-hop MC'ing and soulful runs, the BPM gradually climbs from 88 to over 110, and the track's energy becomes overwhelming. A knockout opener that fades into an airy coda complete with flute, opening the door to a pair of more Latin-flavoured tracks: the sparkling bossa of "Stillness In Time" (flute, Clavinet, backing vocals, assorted percussion) and the more soulful "Half The Man", a midtempo number where the debt to Stevie Wonder becomes even more obvious — without forgoing an acoustic guitar interlude with samba-jazz touches.

"Light Years" is a whole different story, a jolt from the very first heavily percussive piano chords. Beat after beat, the interplay of piano, synth, drums and heavily distorted bass reveals its off-kilter architecture, and just as the ear settles into it, a disorienting pianistic rollercoaster throws off all expectations, opening the way to a chorus of pure Earth, Wind & Fire-style yacht soul. The interplay of darkening and brightening moods keeps raising the stakes, between slashing keyboard hits (from a certain point on backed by a horn section) and increasingly bold fusions of disco lightness and hard-funk grit.

Razor-sharp funk also takes centre stage on "The Kids", which goes all-in from the very first bars with fuzz and wah-wah to build a guitar-bass riff that ranks among the album's most iconic passages. "Manifest Destiny" is another moderate-tempo number, deploying a fine array of diminished chords and major sevenths — business as usual for a band that, from its earliest days, has known how to navigate harmonic sophistication, using it to conjure atmospheres with hidden depths. The high point in this respect, though, is "Mr. Moon", with a chord progression so wild that, entrusted to co-writer Toby Smith's keyboards, it manages to sound utterly natural in its ambiguity (for anyone in the mood for some nerdy fun, here's a handy explanatory video).

Never showy, the band members' instrumental solidity is in fact the linchpin holding the songs together. Masters of fluidity and cohesion, they arguably give their best in the seven acrobatic minutes of "Scam", which merges two compositions dating back to the previous album into a chain of: a descending synth-orchestral spiral, a supremely elastic slap-bass construction, disco-funk feats with distorted guitar and voluptuous string stabs, old-school Chicago-style horn inserts, a gradual slowdown that keeps the tension at its peak, and a latin-jazz coda over Nile Rodgers-style vamping. The only constants are McKenzie's drumming, steadily ahead of the beat, and Jay Kay's free-form vocalising, recorded lo-fi to give it the grain of a bygone-era radio broadcast.

The next two tracks, "Journey To Arnhemland" and "Morning Glory", lean even further into the instrumental side. On the former, Jay Kay's place is taken by Wallis Buchanan's didgeridoo; on the latter — easily the album's most laid-back track — the dreamy, contemplative mood rests mostly on the interplay of synth, percussion and an uncredited harp.

Sparkle, calm, elegance and versatility, grit, spontaneity: all the traits that mark the album's different moments converge on the closing "Space Cowboy" – a track that for many must have been their first encounter with Jamiroquai's music. The song circulated in two different takes: the one on the album, with session player Paul Powell on bass (credited as "Mr. X"), and the one recorded with the band's actual bassist, Stuart Zander. It's actually this version, known as the "Stoned Again" mix and recognizable by the punchy slap-bass line in the chorus, that was recorded first, and it's from this take that the edits used for the radio single and the iconic motion-control video were drawn – the latter visually reworked in the United States to hide the presence of a marijuana leaf.

The singer's fondness for hash and the like is in fact at the heart of the song's lyrics, which celebrate its disinhibiting and broadly spiritual effects. But labelling "Space Cowboy" as a simple drug song would be misleading: written in the midst of the whirlpool of addiction Jay Kay had sunk into after the release of the first album, the song is both an act of self-awareness and a surge of redemption. "Maybe I'm gonna have to get high just to get by", goes the chorus amid falsetto and blue notes; by the author's own admission, the lyrics don't make clear whether the subject is himself or someone else, or whether it's about marijuana or cocaine. What is clear, though, is that it portrays someone who's lost, trying to get back on track before it's too late. Jay Kay would call it his comeback anthem – the self-exhortation he needed to turn his trajectory around. And indeed, the nickname "Space Cowboy" would stick with him throughout the rest of his successful career.

"Space Cowboy" was used outside the UK as the lead single from the album: in Italy, "Musica e Dischi" credits it with a number six chart placing, while "Music & Media"'s airplay chart puts it at number three. As for the album, "The Return Of The Space Cowboy" reached number two on the UK chart and number four in France. Subsequent albums would do even better in terms of success, climbing ever higher: "Travelling Without Moving" (1996) was the first to crack the US Top 30, "Synkronized" (1999) topped the charts in Britain, Australia and Germany, while "A Funk Odyssey" (2001) also reached number one in France and Italy.

The style of these records is always impeccable and grows increasingly energetic and danceable: the public's response is fully justified, but thanks to its precarious balance, "The Return Of The Space Cowboy" holds a special place in the band's trajectory. With one foot in the smooth fusion polish of their early days and the other reaching toward the irresistible immediacy of the massive singles to come, driven by a restlessness that seeks not resolution but motion, it manages to turn chaos into form, uncertainty into openness. Without reaching a compromise or yet finding a genuine method, it gives rise to a fleeting point of contact between instability, control and freedom.

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08/06/2025