A famous name, an Elkhart garage and a family firm.

Otto Link is one of the best-known names in saxophone mouthpieces, and for almost fifty years it has belonged to a company in Elkhart, Indiana. The JJ Babbitt Company says it bought the Otto Link brand in 1977, six years after it bought Meyer Bros. in 1971, and that it moved production of the brands it acquired in that period to its own factory. The man behind the name is far less documented than his mouthpieces: JJ Babbitt’s own history says little about him beyond crediting “the Meyer Brothers and Otto Link themselves” with the slightly concave table their mouthpieces were finished with, and the sources we checked give no reliable biography.

The name was famous long before Elkhart. Wikipedia’s article on Lester Young puts part of the thickening of his tone in the mid-1940s down to a change “from a metal Otto Link to an ebonite Brilhart,” and its article on Bobby Dukoff says the brass mouthpieces Dukoff made in Los Angeles from 1945 to 1949 were “in the Otto Link style.” In Paris the name was recognisable enough that Boris Vian, reviewing records for Jazz Hot in 1949, signed some of his reviews “Otto Link,” French Wikipedia records.

The company that owns it is older still. JJ Babbitt says it was founded in 1919 by Jesse James Babbitt, a former employee of the Buescher band-instrument company, and his brother Rollie, in a two-stall garage in Elkhart — a city it calls “The Band Instrument Capital of the World” — with five workers and a bulldog named Chopper. Jesse’s nephew Eugene “Bud” Reglein joined in 1939, aged nineteen, built machines the company says are still used in production, and later became owner; his son Bill Reglein joined in 1967 and became president. The firm left the garage around 1950 and moved to its present plant in the early 1980s; its own history gives both 1980 and 1981 for that second move.

In December 2019 Steve Rorie, a music-industry veteran, joined as president, and in 2021 he bought the company from the Reglein family trust, the company says; by 2025 its website named Steve and Debbie Rorie, “and now their son Trace Rorie,” as its leadership. Along the way JJ Babbitt also bought David Hite, Inc. of Estero, Florida, in 2005, adding the Premiere and J&D Hite clarinet lines, and in 2015 it added the Portnoy brand.

The Super Tone Master, the Tone Edge and a scale of numbers.

Two models carry most of the Otto Link story. The Super Tone Master is the metal tenor mouthpiece, which JJ Babbitt has sold finished in 24-karat gold and associates with Dexter Gordon, Sonny Rollins, Sonny Stitt, Zoot Sims and Hank Mobley; the Tone Edge is the hard-rubber line, which it links with Stan Getz and Michael Brecker. Independent accounts support some of those names. Wikipedia quotes a 1977 DownBeat interview in which Dexter Gordon described his mouthpiece as an Otto Link with a number 8 tip — 0.110 inch “under the Otto Link system” — and says Brecker played a metal Otto Link “New York” Super Tone Master in the mid-1970s. Its article on Sonny Rollins says his preferred mouthpieces were made by Otto Link and Berg Larsen.

That numbering is part of the brand. Otto Link tip openings run in steps from 4 to 9, with half sizes marked by a star, and JJ Babbitt’s published charts give the tenor 7 as 0.100 inch and the 8 as 0.110 inch, with separate figures for soprano, alto and baritone.

Much of the modern range looks back. JJ Babbitt says it developed the darker New York model in the late 1990s, basing it on the old Tone Master; introduced the Otto Link Vintage tenor for its 90th anniversary in 2009, after three years’ development, to recapture the sound of early Links; and reissued the Tone Edge “Early Babbitt,” molded, it said, in the original molds and finished as the pieces were “from 1975 to 1979” — dates that begin before the 1977 purchase recorded in its own history. The Florida, revived for the company’s centenary in 2019, is described as the brighter Link “first released in 1955,” with a higher baffle and a smaller chamber; the newer LA goes further in the same direction, in hard rubber and metal. Around the turn of the millennium the company also made a limited run of 2,000 Otto Link Millennium tenors in brushed nickel with a blue insert.

Brass, woodwind and the small parts.

A brass or woodwind player’s sound depends on small parts as much as on the instrument. The seven makers here each specialise in one or two of them, and several have changed hands.

Two make mutes. Denis Wick was founded in 1968 by the London Symphony Orchestra trombonist Denis Wick and makes mutes and mouthpieces in Poole, Dorset (“handcrafted in Dorset,” it says); since August 2025 it has been controlled by Music Center of Trento, Italy, Companies House records show. Humes & Berg’s website said in 2012 that Willie Berg founded it in Chicago in 1935 to make Stonelined mutes, and that its factory had been in East Chicago, Indiana, since 1948.

Two make mouthpieces. Otto Link began with Otto Link’s shop in New York in the 1920s; its mouthpieces are made in Elkhart, Indiana, by J.J. Babbitt, which says it acquired the brand in 1977. JodyJazz, founded by the saxophonist Jody Espina in New York in 2000, the company says, makes its mouthpieces in Savannah, Georgia, and owns Chedeville and Rousseau.

Three make reeds and ligatures. Marca was founded in 1957 by Franco Guccini in the Var, in Provence, is run by his grandson and says its reeds are made in France. Rovner, founded by Phil Rovner in 1974, makes its ligatures in Timonium, Maryland (“handmade in the USA,” it says) and has belonged since 2024 to Music Center, which also owns Légère. BG France, a family firm that Franck Bichon founded in 1985 from an idea of his father, the saxophone teacher Serge Bichon, says its ligatures and straps are made in its workshop at Chaponost, near Lyon.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it, and what it says about where its products are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Split manufacturing and a script on a T-shirt.

The biggest change in decades is recent. By 2026 JJ Babbitt’s website was describing “a landmark partnership with Theo Wanne Mouthpieces,” the American maker of CNC-machined mouthpieces covered in our Theo Wanne guide. Its account is specific: Otto Link and Meyer mouthpieces are now made through a “split-manufacturing process” in which “certain stages of manufacturing happen at JJ Babbitt, certain stages happen at Theo Wanne Mouthpieces,” before returning to Elkhart for final finishing. Hard-rubber Links still begin, the company says, with a proprietary rubber “mixed, molded, and vulcanized in-house”; metal Links, once made from two joined halves that could leave a visible seam, are now produced from a single piece of brass; and the slight table concavity has been deliberately changed. It says there are no planned price increases as a result. Before the partnership, its history said that all its products were manufactured completely in its Elkhart factory and called it the only company in the United States to mold its own mouthpieces from scratch; we give both as the company’s own statements.

The identity rests on the name. JJ Babbitt sells its own Otto Link merchandise — T-shirts, caps and a framed print — in versions it labels “classic logo,” “modern logo” and “script,” which shows the company treating the lettering as an asset in its own right. No official colour or typeface is published.

For a design guide, Otto Link shows how a maker’s name can outlive almost everything known about the maker, carried by a scale of numbers, a handful of model names and the players who used them. Compare Henri Selmer Paris and Theo Wanne. For this guide we use hard-rubber black and 24-karat gold with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Otto Link’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.