Jazzocrat

By Benjamin Allen and Ellie Allen

The first note didn’t surprise me. It startled me.

It was a low subtone, the kind you test almost without thinking, a reflex, a way of asking a new mouthpiece who it thinks it is. But this one answered before I finished the question. The sound bloomed immediately, warm and dense, the way the great vintage Florida Tone Edges sometimes do when you’re lucky enough to find one that isn’t warped, worn, or quietly fighting you. I sat back in my chair, the reed still vibrating. After decades of searching, refacing, measuring, and hoping, I knew the feeling. It was the feeling of something rare.

In January, I had written about the unlikely partnership between Theo Wanne and JJ Babbitt (JJB), a collaboration that sounded promising on paper but carried the weight of a century of expectations. The manufacturing logic was compelling. The history was complicated. The question that mattered was the one I was now hearing in the air of my practice room. Could they actually do it?

Two 7* Florida Tone Edges later, the answer was sitting in my hands. They are, without qualification, the finest Florida Tone Edge mouthpieces I have ever played. That includes every vintage original and every professionally refaced piece I have encountered across decades of searching, and as a former mouthpiece maker and refacer myself, that search has been extensive.

But the story of how this sound came to exist began long before I ever played a note.

The Problem They Inherited

Five years before that first note bloomed in my practice room, the JJB factory in Elkhart was a place suspended between pride and fatigue. The company’s legacy was undeniable. Otto Link and Meyer are names that shaped the sound of American saxophone playing. But the day-to-day reality had drifted far from the mythology. Processes lived as undocumented habits, passed down like family stories. Quality depended on who happened to be standing at which bench on which day.

Inside the building, the workers were doing everything they knew how to do. Outside it, the industry had begun to whisper. The gap between effort and perception widened until it became impossible to ignore. And when that truth finally reached the people on the floor, it hurt. They had been working in good faith for years.

This is the part of the story most companies would bury. But Steve Rorie didn’t bury it. He walked straight into it.

When he took the helm, he inherited not just a manufacturing operation but a culture shaped by decades of improvisation, the kind that works until it doesn’t. He could have chosen the easy path, a marketing refresh, a few cosmetic changes, a press release about renewed commitment. Instead, he chose honesty. He acknowledged the gap. He told the truth about what needed to change. And then he began the slow, unglamorous work of rebuilding a foundation that had eroded quietly over time. What he has built works because of the people he brought together and the way he lets them shine.

The People Who Made It Happen

Members of both the Theo Wanne and JJB leadership and teams were kind enough to share with me a detailed account of how the project came together and who drove it forward. It is not the story of a corporate announcement. It is the story of two groups of skilled and dedicated people who found in each other the missing half of a problem they had each been trying to solve.

On the JJB side, Phil Hobson and Alexis Schooley have been equal partners in the manufacturing transformation, working hand in hand to develop what might be called the Babbitt ingredient. Phil approached it from a machinist and mechanical perspective, rebuilding a process that had existed almost entirely as institutional memory, decades of accumulated tribal knowledge with nothing written down, from the ground up through sheer rigor and work ethic. The quality improvements players began noticing in the more recent metal Links trace directly to his efforts. Alexis brought the artisan’s perspective to the hard rubber line, mastering entirely new processes and taking genuine ownership of the team around her. Theo, who has worked with mouthpiece craftspeople across his entire career, has said that Alexis is among the very best he has encountered. Together they have built something neither could have built alone, and the working relationship that developed with the Theo Wanne team has been driven entirely by shared goals rather than competing egos. Steve’s son Trace, a Leadership Development specialist, has nurtured, mentored, and motivated JJB’s three-person production management team into the cohesive unit the project required. That team includes Stephanie Ryman, who oversees the plastic and OEM side of the operation, rounding out a production leadership structure that is quietly as important as anything happening at the bench. Chris French rounds out the JJB core in a way that defies easy summary. He is a world-class saxophonist and clarinetist on faculty at Notre Dame, but also someone with deep hands-on experience in tooling, fabrication, and CAD design, a rare combination of artistry and engineering that made him invaluable at every stage.

On the Theo Wanne side, the effort was all hands on deck. Theo brought not just his deep knowledge of Link history, geometry, and acoustics but the clarity of vision to define what the project needed to be and the leadership to see it through. Bryan Vance, Theo’s COO, hammered out the business and logistical architecture of the shared-ownership partnership while contributing substantive player feedback throughout the refinement process. Thomas Harris, a world-class player in his own right, handled nearly all of the facing and calibration work and was a central presence during the design process. Matt Ambrose, whose work I have written about previously in the context of material behavior and CNC precision, served as master machinist and lead CAD specialist, translating design intentions into the physical geometry the player ultimately encounters. Sean Wheeler brought deep process development experience alongside serious machining skill, working through iteration after iteration of the approach while also shouldering the less visible but equally critical work of quality control. Justin Maurer, whose grandfather Bob Carpenter was one of Theo’s earliest mouthpiece mentors and whose connection to this project carries a quiet thread of continuity, handles all of the Theo Wanne website, photography, social media, and advertising, and has begun extending that work to JJB as the partnership grows. His wife Stephanie Pierce managed inventory, assembly, fulfillment, and shipping. Machinists David Nelson and Mitch Buss kept the machines running nearly around the clock.

Everyone contributed. Having now played the result, I believe it.

I have had the privilege of knowing Theo and his team for many years, and in every interaction they have been among the most technically rigorous and genuinely honorable people in this industry. Steve Rorie’s decision to engage so deeply with them reflects real vision. Bringing that level of integrity and technical mastery into the JJB family is, in my view, one of the most consequential strategic decisions in the modern history of Otto Link, Meyer, and JJB. I am their biggest fan, and I am not kidding.

What the Otto Link Florida Tone Edge 7* Actually Does

The Florida Tone Edge 7* plays with an immediacy I have not experienced in a stock Link mouthpiece before.

Response across the full dynamic range is exceptional. The facing geometry is precise enough that the reed-to-table relationship is consistent and predictable, and you feel that immediately. The mouthpiece does not fight you at low dynamics and does not spread or destabilize at high ones. Subtone is effortless. The low-frequency response is present without requiring embouchure manipulation to find it. The altissimo register speaks with surprisingly little resistance, a direct consequence of a well-executed facing curve and consistent tip rail geometry.

Tonally, the character is exactly what the Florida Tone Edge was always meant to be. A thick, warm core with genuine low-frequency depth, and above that a layer of upper-harmonic presence that gives the sound life without tipping into gratuitous brightness. It has the kind of tonal density that fills a room without shouting, with just enough upper-frequency sparkle to remain present and defined in a band context. Most importantly, the tone is continuous, one voice across the full range of the horn, not three separate registers negotiating with each other.

What separates this from the best vintage pieces I have played is not that it sounds different. It is that it sounds like what the best vintage pieces sounded like, reliably, without having to hunt for the rare one that happens to be right. The CNC-machined facing and internal geometry mean the mouthpiece is not a fortunate accident of an inconsistent manufacturing process. It is the result of people who knew exactly what they were trying to achieve and had the tools, the skill, and the commitment to achieve it.

That reliability is the revolution.

A New Chapter in a Long Story

The vintage Florida Tone Edge and the original Slant Signature produced some of the most iconic saxophone sounds in recorded jazz history. They also produced a great deal of inconsistency, and the search for a truly great one has occupied players and collectors for generations.

When I finally set the horn down after playing these mouthpieces, the room was quiet in the way rooms get quiet after something important has happened. The sound was still hanging in the air, but the realization was louder. This mouthpiece wasn’t an accident. It was the product of a partnership built on honesty, rigor, and character.

I have since ordered the full range, the STM, STM Florida, Tone Edge, and New York Tone Edge, and I will write about each as they arrive. But if the Otto Link Florida Tone Edge is any indication of what this partnership has achieved across the line, the saxophone world is in for something remarkable.

When I shared these impressions with Steve Rorie directly, his response said something I think belongs in this essay. In his words:

“I also am grateful for your personal insights regarding Theo and his team. We have found exactly the same things with regard to their experience, skills, talent and creativity. But what we love most about them all is their character, integrity and their hearts. My son Trace and I knew early in our partnership discussions with Theo, that the coming together of TW and JJB had the makings of exactly what you stated, potentially the most significant chapter in the legendary history of Meyer and Otto Link. The partnership is just getting started but the early signs are encouraging and even quite exciting. But one of the key elements remains hearing from and responding to as well as incorporating input from professionals like you.”

The search for the great Otto Link Florida Tone Edge, the mythical piece that plays the way the legends played, may finally be over. Not because someone found one, but because a group of people decided to build one together, with intention, with honesty, and with the kind of character that turns a manufacturing partnership into something that actually matters.

That last sentence of Steve’s is worth sitting with. This partnership is not a finished product. It is a living collaboration, and player feedback is not peripheral to it. It is part of how it moves forward. If you are playing one of these mouthpieces, your experience is worth sharing.

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For background on the Theo Wanne and JJB partnership and how this manufacturing approach works, please read: Innovation Meets Legacy: Inside the New Theo Wanne and JJ Babbitt Partnership.

For related reading on CNC precision and material behavior in mouthpiece manufacturing: Material Differences and Machining Realities.

A complete list of all Jazzocrat essays can be found here.