5 Minutes That Will Make You Love the Vibraphone

We’re living in the era of “vibes.” But before that word was everywhere — before elections had “vibe shifts” and before a first date could be breezily ended because the vibes were just off — there was the instrument that started it all: the vibraphone.

If you aren’t quite sure what that sounds like — well, there’s only one way to describe it. It’s vibey.

Invented in the 1920s as an electrified variation of the marimba, the vibraphone is made out of tuned metal bars, which the player strikes with mallets; a tubular resonator that carries the sound; and a set of electronically controlled fans affecting how much vibrato goes on the notes (that is, how much they warble). Out of this complex contraption wafts a sound that is mellow and ethereal, but starkly rhythmic. After all, the vibraphone is a percussion instrument: Most vibraphonists who double on something else play the drums.

The vibraphone has been a feature of jazz bandstands since about 1930, when a young Lionel Hampton — one of the first improvisers to master it — impressed Louis Armstrong by playing along with the trumpeter’s solos note for note. At Armstrong’s encouragement, he switched from being a full-time drummer to a vibraphonist. As its popularity grew, jazz musicians gave the instrument a nickname: “the vibes,” a term that came to signify not just the instrument’s metal bars and their vibrations but also the hazy, moody feeling that its sound produced.

It is little wonder that, amid the revolutionary grooves of the 1960s, that term made the leap from jazz (and from Black American vernacular) to the general population. In the process, it gave us a slightly more musical way of describing everyday life.

In the nearly 100 years since Hampton’s innovation, the vibraphone has traveled through the many shifts and stages of jazz and Black American music. These days, it’s being played by a broad range of musicians — from straight-ahead swingers to avant-gardists — a number of whom are quoted below. Read on for an array of vibes-heavy tracks, selected by musicians and writers. You can find a playlist at the bottom of the article, and if you have a personal favorite that wasn’t on the list, go ahead and drop it in the comments.