BANJO

This 18th-century painting, The Old Plantation, includes a man playing a gourd banjo decorated with religious symbols. As early as the 1300s, explorers recorded seeing stringed and plucked instruments throughout West Africa. The tradition of plucking stringed instruments traveled with the slave trade, eventually influencing instruments like the banjo and the guitar here in America. Click below to view musician Rhiannon Giddens performing on a banjo.

TRUMPET

The Tutankhamun Trumpets were found in the pharaoh’s burial chamber. They are the oldest trumpets in the world, buried during the Eighteenth Dynasty of Egypt over 3,000 years ago. The trumpets are so old that when they were played live on radio in April 1939, one of them shattered soon after. 

There are many tales about the ‘magical powers’ of the trumpets, and that when they are played, a war happens. Modern trumpets have valves allowing it to play different pitches. It is used in a number of musical settings including marching bands, symphony orchestras, and jazz bands. Here is a video of the marching band of Southern University, an HBCU (Historically Black Colleges and Universities), featuring trumpets.

MARIMBA

The marimba (muh-RIM-buh) is often confused as a xylophone. It is usually larger, made of wood, and has long tubes called resonators to help the sound last longer than xylos. The earliest known types of these instruments date back to the 1100s. In South Africa, natives played an instrument very similar to the modern marimba known as the balafon (BAH-la-fone). During the slave trade, balafon players were forced to come to America. Today these types of percussion instruments are mostly used in symphony orchestras, concert bands, and percussion ensembles.

But if you go to the 8:30 minute mark of the video below you can see the rare use of a xylophone in a hip-hop song: 

QUIZ

At Waterfront Park there are percussion instruments installed at one of the playgrounds. Can you find them?