The humble tambourine has travelled from ancient Egypt to Motown and Mozart
It looks like a toy, a hoop with jingles, yet the tambourine appears in writing as early as 1700 BC. It kept rhythm for enslaved Americans denied drums, carried gospel into Motown, gave rock singers something to do with their hands, and turns up in Tchaikovsky and Holst.
A tambourine is a frame, usually wood or plastic, fitted with pairs of small metal jingles called zills; strictly it also has a drumhead, though headless versions exist. Its origin is unknown, but ancient musicians in Egypt and the Near East played it before it spread to Greece and on into Europe with merchants and performers. The Hebrews knew it as the tof and used it mostly in worship. Relatives span the globe: the daf, a big Perso-Arabic frame drum that marks beat and tempo like a conductor, the Slavic buben, and the Brazilian pandeiro, carried over by Portuguese settlers.
Players shake it, stroke the jingles, strike it with hand or stick, or knock it against a hip. The simplest roll comes from twisting the wrist rapidly back and forth; the harder thumb roll means running a thumb or middle finger around the head, about a centimetre in from the rim, so it bounces and sets the jingles chattering. In late 1700s England a salon craze had composers marking parts with as many as 30 distinct strokes.
Its American story carries weight. Enslaved Africans were forbidden drums, which could signal over distance, so they turned to bones, clapping and the tambourine to accompany spirituals and dances. From church it moved into blues and jazz; Josh White began as a child busker drumming the instrument off his elbows and knees. In the 1950s Ray Charles and others folded gospel into rhythm and blues, and Motown singers raised in church brought it along; the Supremes carried two, used as much for choreography as sound.
Rock embraced it. The Byrds' 1965 take on Bob Dylan's song Mr. Tambourine Man leans on it to push the beat, and singers who otherwise play nothing, Mick Jagger, Janis Joplin, Stevie Nicks, reach for a headless jingle ring onstage. Drummers such as Larry Mullen Jr have bolted one into their kits, while Bill Ward of Black Sabbath rigged his to a foot pedal. Orchestras adopted it earlier: Mozart was an early user, and it rings through Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker, the Jupiter movement of Holst's The Planets and Bizet's Carmen.
Source: Tambourine
