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Quaveringly Quantized on a Quasar with Jamiroquai's Toby Smith


Keyboard: February 1997, pp. 56-7.
Kyle Swenson

If you were to be blindfolded at a Jamiroquai show as the band kicked into their third album's opening song, "Virtual Insanity," you might think one of the roadies snuck Stevie Wonder onstage to sing. Take off the blindfold and you'll see a 27-year-old dance-crazed light-skinned British guy named Jay Kay. He sings about saving the earth and coos about meeting girls from quasi-stellar neighborhoods; Jamiroquai will throw your expectations for a loop.

Style Exposure. Five years ago, keyboardist Toby Smith joined singer Jason (Jay) Kay to concoct the funky stew that is Jamiroquai. Both grew up under the influences of jazz. Jay spent his rug-rat years traveling with his jazz-singing mother Karen Kay. And although the record companies weren't overly supportive, Toby's father tried his luck singing in college. "My dad was in jazz," says Toby. "It was like a three-piece band. So I had that influence around me, but when I went to school I got into house music." Although Toby began classical training before he could reach the piano pedals, he took some time to find his musical niche. "I was at school and I was in a band, kind of a Hendrix blues band. I played bass rather than keyboards. And then I heard some house music in '88, when it started kicking in, and I said, 'This is easy. I can do this.'" While cooling down from his involvement in the London house scene, Toby realized his appreciation for funk music and analog synthesizers. "I started doing the type of music that I love, that I aspire to now, like Marvin Gaye, Donald Byrd, Stevie, Herbie Hancock." He ditched his old Roland D-70 and Korg M1 for some even older and newer toys with knobs and filters.

On tour Toby brings his Moog Source, Hohner Clavinet, Novation BassStation, Yamaha CS1x, and Fender Rhodes 88, mixing up his smooth piano chord rhythms with cartoonish analog space bleeps. Attached to his Rhodes are an Electro-Harmonix Electric Mistress phaser and a wah-wah pedal. To appease the roadies, Toby took his Rhodes 88 stage model on tour without the speaker cabinet. "I also bought a Mutron," says Toby, "which is like a bass effects pedal, but I can use it on one of the keyboards as well, maybe on the Clav to get a really envelopy 'bow-wow' sort of thing."

Vintage Collector. Why did Toby dump the digital gear to go the way of the Moog? "Because they sound so much better. I just prefer the sculptural ability of getting the sounds; there's something simple about it." At home, his catalog of analog includes two Moog Sources, Sequential Circuits Prophet-T8 ("the supreme mother of synths"), Memorymoog, ARP Odyssey and 2600, Roland SH-101 and SH-7, and a Minimoog, "which I didn't use so much, because it was buggin'." Toby's obsession with vintage doesn't end with synthesizers. Like Jay, he owns a slew of old cars, one being a 1968 orange Lamborghini Miura. Unfortunately, says Toby, Jay hasn't been able to drive any of his eight classic roadsters since his license was recently revoked for speeding.

Two-Hand Dilemma. The guys will be too busy to drive for a while. The European tour began in Dublin last October where Toby promptly came down with tonsilitis. Shortly after, Jay managed to get shingles, and the band had to cancel eight shows. But before Keyboard's press time, all 11 members of the band (including didjeridooist Wallis Buchanan, bassist Stuart Zender, drummer Derrick McKenzie, Toby, and Jay) had planned a tour in Europe, Japan, and Australia, after which they'll fly to the U.S. in February for stateside gigs. Even with all those people crammed on stage, Toby is solely responsible for the keyboard parts, and from listening to Jamiroquai's third album, Travelling Without Moving, it's clear that there's a whole lot for him to accomplish live. "It gets a bit tricky, 'cause I've got two hands, haven't I? Most of the time it's all right. The strings I have the DJ play. We have a DJ who plays various aspects of the slbum on vinyl." The string parts were arranged by Simon Hale, who assembled 12 string players and translated Jay's vocal ideas into parts for violins, violas, and cellos.

Live Freakiness. Jamiroquai is known for getting nutty onstage. Toby even goes so far as to say they can be amateurish. In Naples, Italy, the band had a bizarre reaction from the crowd. "When we played in Naples, that was quite magic actually. In the show, once we'd gone off in the encore, everybody starting singing. They picked a note and it just grew into this fat chord. And it is quite mad when you've gone off backstage and you just hear it started off like a note -- and this is 6,000 people. Then we went back up onstage; it was in D. So we just grooved while they were still singing the note. This was lucky, because we did a cover called "Turn Off the Lights," which we play in D, so we just slipped that tune in while they were still singing."

Acid-funk-jazz-disco-hop? Although Jay doesn't actually play an instrument (he tried the flute for a while), he and Toby sit down, put their heads together, and construct music. "If it's a brass idea, [Jay will] sing it to the brass and the brass will play it," says Toby. This time around, the band collaborated with the Mad Professor on the reggae tune "Drifting Along," and with M Beat on the jungle-esque "Do You Know Where You're Coming From?" Aside from Jamiroquai's dabbling into new styles, categorizing the band has to be an interesting feat for radio music directors and Billboard chart managers. "We don't fit into any radio format. It's not black R&B, it's not guitar indie," says Toby. Not only is the band having a hard time fitting into a musical niche, they're also dealing with attacks from critics about political beliefs, particularly Jay's.

Remember Toby and Jay's classic car fetish? Jay's got a few Ferraris stored away, and has been criticized for spouting off about ecological issues as he's speeding off to the next gas station; people can't quite connect the two obsessions. "Yeah, he's very outspoken about it and he's speaking from a layman's point of view," says Toby. "Personally, I don't know what the fuss is about. What Jay says is true. It's things some people know and some people don't know. For the third album we've kind of put that aside a bit, the ecological things. It's meant to be a much more boogie, party album with more disco tracks on it, more funky."

With that haunting bastard-son-of-Stevie voice, and with Jay and Toby directing dozens of colorful instrumental parts, why complain about the amount of chrome and leather in their garage? Jamiroquai can wear clown makeup and eat haggis/lutefisk casseroles onstage, so long as they keep dishing out the funky stuff.