The family of musical instruments musicologists call "ideophones" is more familiar than the names suggests. Its members share a set of tone bars laid across a frame and struck with mallets. Modern classical orchestras have the xylophone with its hard wooden bars, and the glockenspiel with its thinner metal bars. Jazz artists like Lionel Hampton and Milt Jackson of the Modern Jazz Quartet play vibes (also called vibraharp or vibrophone), a more robust version with full-bodied metal bars. Indonesia has the gamelan, an orchestra in bronze. Latin America has the marimba. These instruments are both percussive and melodic. They play tuned rhythmic patterns. And like so many instruments, they may well have African origins.
The name marimba comes from southern Africa where instruments of this sort are plentiful. In recent decades, marimba orchestras out of the Pacific Northwest have sparked a grass-roots movement that is spreading through the United States. These groups generally focus on Shona music from Zimbabwe. But in West Africa, there is a completely different ideophone tradition associated with griots and hunters, the music of the balaphone.
For the Manding people of West Africa the balaphone has particular historical importance.
balaphone performance
photo of the balaphone
The West African balaphone is both percussive and melodic, and has many musical relatives around the world.