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https://www.ebay.ca/itm/363670646614?ha ... SwlMxhwVrZ

Looks pretty nice for someone willing to work on the bottom bow.

Looks like those Buescher horns with the low set recording bell.

Tubajug wrote: ↑Wed Dec 29, 2021 10:39 pm Looks like those Buescher horns with the low set recording bell.

I'll take another look...

Totally read Besson to me, especially those valve caps.

humBell wrote: ↑Wed Dec 29, 2021 11:12 pm

Tubajug wrote: ↑Wed Dec 29, 2021 10:39 pm Looks like those Buescher horns with the low set recording bell.

I'll take another look...

Totally read Besson to me, especially those valve caps.

You're right, Besson is what I meant. I had my B's mixed up. Thanks for correcting me!

The Evette marque is/was used by Buffet-Crampon for their lower-priced lines of clarinets for decades. Now that they also own Besson, I think this is probably a budget model budget line B-C "Besson" made in France (or wherever these things are made today). If this is the case, it can be no older than fifteen years as this change of ownership took place in 2006.

But what do I know?

All sorts of instruments have been made and engraved with competitors and other sellers names on them, over the years. This looks like a 50 - 60 year old Edgware Rd. (Besson/Boosey & Hawkes - London) tuba that Buffet must have contracted for (perhaps in the 1950s or 1960s), so they would have a tuba to offer in their brochure, at that given point in time.
Leblanc was making some 3+1 Besson-ish looking tubas (albeit very small bore: .625”) at that time, but I’m sure that Buffet didn’t want to buy them from them (arch-competitor), yet probably wanted to offer a competing instrument, thus contacting Boosey and Hawkes.
Over the years, we've adjusted/repaired/repadded quite a few Conn-made "Shooting Stars"-era alto saxophones with "Evette" engraved on them, as well as some Italian-made "Grassi" tenor saxophones. (In the very distant past, there WERE some "genuinely Evette and Schaeffer" alto and tenor saxophones.) ...and we've all seen curious collaborations, between Yamaha and C.G. Conn, Schilke, G. Leblanc, and Bach. (etc., etc., etc.), and even Conn-and-Olds, Blessing-and-Conn, and others.

The above scenario makes the most sense to me.
The pictures are not high resolution, but I can’t make them into anything other than an old English-made Besson tuba.


bottom bow/bell/everything else: In my estimation, the cost of the repairs would quickly exceed the value of the instrument.

I think the marking is probably Besson Brevete, not Evette. I had a sousaphone marked Brevete that I had fixed up nearly 20 years ago and purchased for very little on eBay. Harv from Harv's Happy Horns (God rest his soul) helped me get the right parts including a #1 piston to get her playing. It was a decent old horn after my local shop got the new piston honed and the mouthpipe repaired. I ended up re-eBaying it to a Banda guy and it was destined for Mexico. Here are some of the pictures of that sousa saved off from long ago and archived on yorkmaster.org. Notice the same piston top caps as Bloke points out.




Bill Vance

Bill’s supposition makes the most sense of all.