Glo Tone

Glo Tone may be the most obscure and fleeting of all the Chicago independents owned by trumpeter Melvin Moore. He was born in Chicago in 1923, led the cornet and trumpet section of the Du Sable High School marching band, and had already recorded with Marl Young on 5 sessions.

Glo Tone released two singles by Moore's fairly big bop band. One side featured a vocal group called the Original Calypso Boys and the other three gave the spotlight to a still-scuffling nightclub singer named Joe Williams. And the arrangements as well as the presence of a Marl Young composition already recorded for Sunbeam ("Too Lazy to Work, Too Nervous to Steal") hint at some piece of business left unfinished by the closedown of that label—in November 1947, when Young moved to Los Angeles.

Glo Tone vanished after less than a year in operation. Joe Williams went on to record for Columbia, OKeh, and Blue Lake and finally caught his break in 1954.

Melvin Moore made a brief stop at Chance and a slightly longer one at Vee-Jay before making his own move to Southern California, where he would eventually work with Charles Mingus and Johnny Otis, and play in the band for "Here's Lucy" under the direction of Marl Young. Melvin Moore died in Los Angeles in 1989.

Source: The Red Saunders Research Foundation