Mayreh is a hard bop composition by pianist Horace Silver, one of his original tunes from the early 1950s. It is a contrafact based on the chord changes of All God's Chillun Got Rhythm, the 1937 Bronislau Kaper, Walter Jurmann, and Gus Kahn standard from the Marx Brothers film A Day at the Races, with Silver supplying a new melody over the familiar harmonic framework. The tune is written in a blues-inflected hard bop idiom, featuring altered dominant chords with sharp-nine and flat-nine tensions that give the harmony a biting, aggressive edge, while the rhythmic feel is straight-ahead swing at a medium-up tempo. Silver's melody is characteristic of his compositional style: earthy, riff-based, and groove-oriented, blending gospel and blues inflections with bebop sophistication. The definitive early recording comes from the Art Blakey Quintet's legendary live sessions at Birdland in February 1954, with Clifford Brown on trumpet, Lou Donaldson on alto saxophone, Curly Russell on bass, and Blakey on drums, released on A Night at Birdland Vol. 1. While not as widely performed as Silver's biggest hits like Song for My Father or The Preacher, Mayreh has been arranged for big band by John La Barbera and covered by artists including Rolf Kuhn and Greg Abate. It appears in the official Horace Silver Songbook published by Sher Music and remains part of the hard bop repertoire valued by educators and transcribers.
