Dalton Stanland Covers a Mario Song and It Somehow Rips: “New Donk City” is Out Now

There’s a saxophonist from Lexington, Kentucky named Dalton Stanland. He has six DownBeat Magazine national student awards, an album coming June 12 on EMPIRE, and he just dropped a jazz cover of the city theme from Super Mario Odyssey as his debut single. It’s called “New Donk City.” It is genuinely, uncomplicatedly great.

We know how that sounds. We had the same face you’re making right now. Then we pressed play.

What Stanland does with the melody — originally written by Naoto Kubo, Shiho Fujii, and Koji Kondo for Nintendo — is root it deep in the bebop tradition and let it breathe. This is not a meme. This is not ironic. This is a saxophonist who grew up on Charlie Parker and John Coltrane and Sonny Rollins treating a beloved video game composition with the same seriousness he’d give any standard, and the thing just swings. Hard.

Dalton Stanland built his ear in his teacher’s basement in Lexington, surrounded by records, absorbing the language of jazz until it became his own. That foundation is all over this track. The phrasing is confident, the tone is warm, and there’s this undeniable sense of fun running through the whole thing that never tips into silliness. It’s joyful in the way that the best jazz is joyful — like the musician is having the time of their life and pulling you along for it.

His debut album Oasis drops June 12 via EMPIRE and if “New Donk City” is any indication, it’s going to be one of the more interesting jazz records of the year.

go press play. trust us on this one.