Sticky Beast, a journey to the jazz stars 2024 is the Year of the Beast for jazz in Mexico, Sticky Beast’s first album will be released slowly.

Despite the fact that only 1.4% of the population listens to jazz and there are very few places to enjoy it live, there is an unknown national movement, anthologized by journalist Antonio Malacara Palacios in the three volumes of the Atlas of Jazz in Mexico, of which the fourth volume is expected. This is proof that the national Latin jazz talent, Dixieland, free and fusion, is dispersed and we only know the surface: groups like A Love Electric, a powerful trio of guitarist Todd Clouser, or the psychedelic jazz sextet from Guadalajara, Troker, and the favorite of this column, Sr. Mandril, a combo formed in the nineties by Germán González and Ramsés Ramírez, who during the pandemic isolation started personal projects out of pure creative necessity. One such project is Germán González and Roberto “Robersonic” Flores’ Sticky Beast, a duo of composers, producers and musicians that sits at the intersection of time between the seventies, eighties and the recent 2000s. Both members are part of Sr. Mandril, evolving without abandoning the practice of putting the rhythms and sounds of Latin jazz, rock, pop, techno and funk into the processor, improvising with electric instruments, guitar, bass and analog synthesizers, on the tracks of electronic dance music, samples, beats and virtual instruments.

Right now they are putting together their first LP: Unleashed, a record to dance to at 123 beats per minute. González plays guitar and bass, while Flores takes care of the keyboards, synthesizers, drum machines, samples, talk box, vocoder and all kinds of noise tools. They combine rock guitar and funk bass, in the style of Funkadelic, on seventies grooves that move with high energy.

The album is being released track by track and openly to the public. They already have “Disco Beast,” “Final Round,” “Don’t Stop the Music,” “Hungry Wolves,” and “Beast Mode On” ready. And they started uploading them to streaming platforms, releasing one each month until
the album’s ten tracks are complete. On March 8, they released the first single, “Dancing in the Moon,” a funk/soul/rock song with retrofuturistic Juan García Esquivel-style settings, Afro rhythms, black voices, and synthesizers that bend and braid spatial effects in series. That’s Sticky Beast’s idea: to teleport the listener to a nocturnal atmosphere that beats between the chaos and science fiction of the sixties. A trip to the jazz stratosphere guided by a pair of musical travelers who are not afraid to experiment with AI or work online with artists from New Orleans and South Africa.

The next single will be released on April 19 — the real World Bicycle Day — and so on, one each month, until the album is ready at the end of the year. Have a good trip to the dance floor.