Stewart plagiarized this theme from Jorge Ben's "Taj Mahal" (originally done in 1972 but this later version's better):
Rod Stewart apparently had spent leisure time in Brasil....
It sounds like "Tajee" in two syllables because in Portuguese you can't end a word in a consonant so an extra vowel sound always shows up (as in Italian).
-- combined with the sound of initial R sounding something like an English H, this also leads to some interesting word-borrowings, e.g. the word "rock" in Brazil is pronounced like the English word "hockey" and the word "rap" comes out sounding like "happy".
