Stuart Zender

Stuart Patrick Jude Zender (born 18 March 1974) is an English bassist. He is best known as a former member of the band Jamiroquai.

Zender was born in Sheffield, England. He comes from a family with a musical background: Zender's father was a musician, his uncle was a flamenco guitarist, and his older sister participated in punk bands. His family relocated to Norristown, Pennsylvania, when Zender was seven years old. He moved back to England at age 15, where he attended Leighton Park School in Reading, UK, for a year in 1988–89 before being expelled. Zender played the snare drums for his school's marching band before he started to play bass at age 16. He practiced the instrument playing by ear to Black Market by Weather Report, and he was able to play all of the bass parts in two weeks. Before leaving his home at age 17, Zender's mother had saved for him £2,000 for the occasion. Zender initially played in pubs with a punk rock band, but he had creative differences with the band. He recalled being "stuck onstage, playing these little four-chord songs. I would always jazz the whole thing up and start doing solos and things like that, and they would just tell me to shut up."

Zender admitted that he never had good business acumen, so instead of investing his mother's parting cash gift in a traditional way, he visited a music store and bought a Warwick Streamer bass guitar, which cost nearly the whole amount given to him by his mother. Before picking up a Warwick, Zender played a Music Man Stingray bass guitar. Of his early bands, the most famous was the prank rock group Fabulous, a 1991 outfit chiefly made up of NME writers and photographers.

Zender met Jamiroquai's original drummer Nick van Gelder through his sister. He auditioned for the band in 1993 as the band's bassist, and he played on studio albums from Emergency on Planet Earth (1993) to Travelling Without Moving (1996). From there, Zender was asked to become an official Warwick basses endorser. He received a number of unique customised Streamer models.

Zender left Jamiroquai in 1998 during the recording of their fourth album, Synkronized, primarily because of conflicts with the band leader Jay Kay. A spokesperson for the band said that Zender also expressed his desire to spend more time with his new wife Melanie Blatt and their new baby.