Hampton, of course, quickly realized the instrument’s expressive capabilities and deployed it as a frontline lead instrument. The New Orleans trumpeter was intrigued by its sound and allowed Hampton to play it on the song “Memories Of You.” Thus began the vibraphone’s long association with jazz. When the first vibraphones (or vibraharps as they were sometimes known) came off the production line eight years later, their otherworldly sound meant that they were initially used on novelty recordings but in 1930, drummer Lionel Hampton, who also played the xylophone, came across one in NBC studios in New York during a recording session with Louis Armstrong. His experiment resulted in a contraption that used metal bars configured in a three-octave keyboard layout on a frame but his major innovation was installing a small motor (the type used on record players of the time), whose speed determined the strength of the vibrato effect that gave the instrument its name.
But jazz wasn’t on instrument maker Herman Winterhoff’s radar when he conceived the vibraphone in 1916 as a device that combined the resonance of a pipe organ with the attack of a marimba, a percussion instrument played with mallets. Nothing sounds cooler in jazz than the limpid, bell-like chimes of a vibraphone as its notes cascade over a swinging groove.
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