Buffalo Man

"Buffalo Man" is the name of the silhouette character featured on most of the covers of "'Jamiroquai's releases.

Origins

"Buffalo Man" was created sometime prior to the release of their 1992 single "When You Gonna Learn", allegedly it was originally sketched by the band's primary songwriter and front-man Jason Kay as "Buffalo Man" is seemingly a self portrait silhouette of Jason wearing a buffalo hat. The mark has been used on almost every commercial (and sometimes non-commercial) release of the band's output in some form or another; usually the unique symbol is pictured unaltered, but there have been times where it is shown in a stylised manner to suit the artwork or song.

Notable variations

Over the years, Buffalo Man has seen some temporary changes or interesting thematic uses:

= " Space Cowboy", "The Return of the Space Cowboy" =

For the single "Space Cowboy", "Buffalo Man" is present on the cover as a shaped cigarette paper for a half-complete cannabis joint, in reference to the song's praise of the drug.

"Virtual Insanity", "Travelling Without Moving"

For the single of "Virtual Insanity", Buffalo Man appears in the place of the Ferrari horse in an homage to Jason's love of sports cars. For the album cover to "Travelling Without Moving", the artwork is similar, but takes on an embossed effect and is seen on a metal grille.

"Cosmic Girl", "Everyday"

For these two releases, Buffalo Man is pictured with a star over his heart and two intersecting orbital rings.

"Synkronized"

While the design remained fundamentally unaltered, Buffalo Man has been turned into a laser-cut mirror and photographed from interesting angles by Midori Tsukagoshi. On some editions, for the disc itself, no ink has been used on the character, but the same stone background found on the front cover has been used for the rest of the disc, thus allowing the consumer to recreate the photographed effect.

"A Funk Odyssey"

For this album, the Buffalo Man was notably absent from the cover; instead, the laser lights formed an outline of the Buffalo Man logo, which could be seen much more clearly in the album's liner notes.

Text logo

Just like the Buffalo Man, the Jamiroquai text logo has also had several variations depending on the theme. The oldest version of the logo is the one seen on the Acid Jazz Records release of When You Gonna Learn. In comparison to the current text logo one can see that the old Acid Jazz Records version of the logo was more angular at points, together with the letters being much thinner. Several variations of the current logo also exist. Releases of "Cosmic Girl" and the promo CD of Everyday had replaced the dots above the 'i' letters with stars. Other slight, temporary variations include a slight vertical stretch of the typeface, as seen on the cover art of "A Funk Odyssey".

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External links

* [http://www.jamiroquai.com/ Jamiroquai's official website]
* [http://www.funkin.com/ Funkin.com for discography and images of most of Jamiroquai's releases]
* [http://funkin.com/the_band/logos/ An article on the history of the Buffalo Man logo at Funkin.com]