The great Mr. Sousa had nothing to do with this instrument, although his name was mentioned and misspelled twice. Thank goodness this BBBb tuba was restored. I'm a tuba player and Sousa buff so my heart was stirred at the mention of both. Interesting documentary. The hardest part of playing a deep bass is more the weight than the wind, and no reputable composer would torment a bass player with a 10-measure long sustained note! Oom-pahs are quite manageable.

Amazing research! Tremendous thanks for bringing this history to light!

In the early '70's as a music major (tuba) at the University of Maine we would drive down to Carl Fisher's in Boston to buy music, particularly instrumental solos.

I saw this giant tuba on display at Carl Fisher Music store in lower Manhattan about 1985. The store was just down the block from Cooper Union and across the street from McSorley's. As a serious amateur musician, it was fun to shop for sheet music at the Fisher store but nobody in the store knew much about the huge instrument on display in the front window of the building. To my uncertain knowledge, the Fisher music store is long gone. At this same time period, a whole block of music stores were located just off of Times Square on 45th Street (?) or thereabouts. One of the stores, Giardinelli perhaps, had an enormous saxophone hanging on the wall above the entry. They called it the octocontrabass sax but it was not a playable instrument.

Brilliant video, can't believe took me this long to find it, Brilliant!!!

Very interesting!! As a tuba player myself, this reminds me of my period playing the contrabass tuba in a Norwegian military band. Coming from bands where we had purchased German style CC tubas with rotary valves, we now had to play the BESSON horns. I was used to playing my dear Miraphone 88 CC with 5 rotary valves (in reality a 5/4 tuba). Moving to a BESSON New Standard BBb 4/4 with 3 top action valves was really horrible. Ergonomic, the British style big tubas have a very bad layout - espesially for marching purposes. Although beeing only 4/4 tubas, they are spread wide out vertically. The lead pipe is placed far to high, therefore the bottom bow rests nearly on your knees when marching. Therefore, you got a nasty kick from the instrument and the mouth piece, every time you heaved your knees high and fast - and that was the marching style of the Royal Norwegian Gards. It was not at all heathty for the embouchure. The rest of the instrument was also not very convincing (low register, intonation, core, sound quality), compared to the advanced German style rotary CC and BBb contrabass 4/4 or 5/4 tubas - and even less compared to the American style 6/4 York based tubas (Nirschl, MMW Baer, Yamayork, Yorkbrunner, Eastman, ZO Thunderbird). All in all, BESSON big and nice to look at - but in some aspects far behind German and American style instruments! Big, wide spread and visual impressive is by all means not equal with musical supremacy...!

Wonderful!