Dead true.
To go further - a lot of what of makes that line (and lots of other cool stuff) sound great goes way beyond "tone" and even beyond the actual notes being played. Strings/pickups/bass/rig et cetera will affect the basic sound that comes out, but it's right and left hand technique that will shape the punch/articulation/dynamics of what's played. This is what I think people mean when the say "the sound is in your hands" - the baseline (forgive the pun) of what we hear depends to some extent on gear, but the music that gets made is so much more than that. That's why that Jamiroquai line can sound great on a P/J/Stingray or whatever, with flats or rounds, EQed all sorts of ways - what's being played is just great almost regardless of personal preferences about these things. So, if you want to get the essence of what's being done there in your own lines, focus on what makes it great and then use that to inform your own approach to playing it - the strings you use or other gear aspects really are secondary.
To put it another way, I think we all (myself included) sometimes make the mistake of thinking "If I use these strings on that bass with these pickups and plug into that amp, I'll get the musical results I really want to achieve." But we won't. Not even anywhere close. We'll get the baseline (no pun, again) that we want, maybe. That gets us perhaps 5% of the way towards we're after, maximum. The rest is down to what we do with it using our magic fingers. Soemtimes it's cool to obsess about that 5% and we all love to do it. But let's not forget that it's 5%! Hell, I need to focus on the other 95% just as much as we all do.
Don't get me wrong, I like talking about strings with the rest of the guys! But this is just something to think about - good luck with copping the feel you're after!
