Leo, a friend of mine from the SOTW site is located in Sao Paulo, Brazil. He has tried a number of Brazilian and other South American saxophones and mouthpieces. The contra and bass saxes pictured are the compact height models which make them about the height of a baritone sax. 

The height is diminished by wrapping the neck a few, okay a lot of extra times. And the price is a lot less than the same kind of instruments from major band instrument manufacturers because the J’elle instruments are new designs.

These instruments use a baritone mouthpiece. Apparently it works and has been done on vintage bass saxes for some time now. There is a another company making mouthpieces called Barkley. They make all sizes from soprano to bass sax pieces.

The Barkley mouthpieces are make by a Brazilian company. They don’t have a Web site yet but you can contact them with the information gleaned from the SoTW site. 

Leo has purchased some of these pieces and says that he likes them. If I understand Leo correctly these pieces can be modeled after the more expensive Meyer, Yanagisawa, and Vandoren styles.

Leo is going to try to get me some of these gratis to try out and I’ll report back to y’all if that happens. They are stunningly beautiful mouthpieces that will surely be very popular if Barkley can keep the prices down. I should ask some of my mouthpiece fabricators what they think of these pieces too. If the Barkley pieces are hand-worked, they should be very smooth playing providing a playing experience like that of a custom mouthpiece.