J Mouton Natural Sandblast Poker w/ Black Bamboo Handmade Briar Pipe, New

Description

Born and raised in the small town of Gueydan, Louisana, Jason Mouton’s rise in the ranks of American pipe makers has been nothing less than meteoric—and for good reason. Having crafted duck calls since he was a teenager, Mouton’s first forays into pipe making began with carving tampers. Mouton’s unexpected and substantial successes with these handmade tampers encouraged and allowed him to purchase the equipment needed to create pipes themselves. Studying the works of renowned American artisans such as J. Alan, Grant Batson, and Jared Coles, Mouton gradually developed his own pipe making craft, which was furthered by his exchanges with Greek artisan Chris Asteriou. Today, Mouton’s works are some of the most sought after on the artisan market, a demand which he has responded to—and not unlike his beginnings in carving tampers—by reinvesting his successes into an unwavering advancement of his skills and technique.

Ordinarily, when someone is referred to as a “Jack of all trades,” the implied caveat is that they, as the idiom concludes, are a “master of none.” Perhaps this idiom needs to be revised, for as far as pipe making goes, at least, Jason Mouton is quickly showing himself to be a master of everything. In the past few days alone, I’ve added a modernized tavern pipe and a Tokutomi-esque tomato by J. Mouton, both flawless in execution, and those only account for a small portion of the portfolio he’s developed on MBSD Pipes alone. Here we find Mouton’s rendition of a shape that, like many of the classics, is at once easy to make and difficult to make well. But it is also a shape that is near-impossible to make well enough to stand out amongst others, especially after Tom Eltang and his spearheading of a functionalist revival in recent decades, with one focal point of this revival being the humble poker. Yet shapes like the poker and the opera (as well as their hybridized “Popera” form) have become highly coveted, signature shapes from Mouton, in part because they are indeed so well made, and in part because of the little things. This near-naked sandblasted poker is exactly what it needs to be—clean, balanced, lightweight—and its use of black bamboo for a shank extension is not unprecedented (though the resulting black and tan color palette is perfectly co-ordinated), but Mouton has also gone to the trouble of adding the most subtle of ornamentations: two pearls of polished bamboo lumber inlaid in the bamboo’s two nodes, one above, one below. There’s another saying, that “it’s the little things that matter,” that’s fitting here, and without any caveats. After all, if someone puts that much thought into the subtlest details, you can be pretty certain that they’ve done the same for the more conspicuous ones.

 

Details:

Length: 5.2″ / 132.0mm

Bowl Width: 0.74 / 18.79mm

Bowl Depth: 1.55″ / 39.37mm

Weight: 0.9oz / 26g