The Cuban pianist Alfredo Rodríguez Jr. shared on his Instagram account a version of the Super Mario Bros. soundtrack transformed into Cuban music, featuring a sound that directly evokes timbera sounds fused with piano classics from the Island.
The video, presented as a soundcheck, features the trio composed of Rodríguez on piano, Michael Olivera on percussion, and Yarel Hernández on bass. "What if Mario had grown up in Cuba?" wrote the pianist when he published it, and the audience's response came quickly: over 14,600 likes and 331 comments on Instagram.
This is not an isolated experiment. The three musicians are the same trio that recorded the album ¡Take Cover!, released in January of this year under the label Take Cover Records, in which they reinterpret eleven popular international songs—from Hotel California to Mission Impossible—with Cuban rhythms and jazz improvisation.
Among these topics is precisely a version of La Comparsa, which explains the stylistic connection with Ernesto Lecuona that becomes immediately apparent when listening to the soundtrack of the most famous plumber in the world transformed into a son rhythm.
The theme of the video game is not new in Rodríguez's repertoire either: his album Duologue from 2019, recorded with Pedrito Martínez, already included the theme from Super Mario Bros 3. The video from this summer represents a new interpretation of that material, now in a trio format and with the energy of a spontaneous rehearsal.
Michael Olivera, born in Santa Clara and trained at the National School of Art (ENA) in Havana, currently resides in Madrid, where he leads The Cuban Jazz Syndicate and has collaborated with figures such as Sting, Esperanza Spalding, and Tomatito.
Yarel Hernández, a bassist born in Fomento, Sancti Spíritus, in 1985, also attended the ENA and settled in Madrid in 2019. His career includes international tours as a bassist and musical director for Ricardo Arjona.
The three share Cuban roots, training in the same institutions on the Island, and current residence outside of it—a musical diaspora that continues to produce some of the most creative proposals in contemporary Cuban music from abroad.
Alfredo Rodríguez Jr., discovered by Quincy Jones at the Montreux Festival in 2006 and nominated for a Grammy in 2015 for his version of Guantanamera, has a documented history of bringing Cuban music to unexpected territories: in 2018, he had already made a viral version of Für Elise by Beethoven in timba, and in 2021, he reinterpreted songs associated with Havana with the same spirit of reinvention.
The album ¡Take Cover! also features collaborations with Pedrito Martínez, Alain Pérez, Cimafunk, and Al2 El Aldeano, a lineup that confirms the project goes much deeper than a viral soundcheck.
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