BYRON PETERSON ORCHESTRA jazz rock usa

Once America’s #1 organizer of dance workshops and competitions, Hoctor Dance Enterprises was established in 1959 by Danny and Betty Hoctor, a famous dance team who later founded a record company to produce material for dance instruction. From the early 1960s they produced wide range of music intended for dancing. Most of the albums produced are non-interesting traditional stuff, but there’s several pearls to be found from their catalogue too. Not much info is available of this record’s artist, Byron Peterson, except a short bio that’s written on the back cover. The title Jazz rock U.S.A. is a little misleading one. the record doesn not contain any jazz-rock at all, it’s a mixture of mellow jazz grooves and jazzfunk. In their own way all the tracks are good or at least decent. There’s a lot of percussion, catchy horns and no electric guitar at all. Despite the occasional cheesy feeling, Jazz rock U.S.A. is one of the best ones as a whole in the Hoctor catalogue. Album starts with a groovy midtempo track “Sunday satisfaction” that has a kind of a break in the beginning and nice mellow groove throughout the song. Next up is a smooth cover of Bill Withers‘ classic “Ain’t no sunshine” that starts as a mellow downtempo groover and suddenly fastens the pace with a percussion break before getting back to mellowness again. Much covered Isaac Hayes‘ “Theme from Shaft” follows. It’s a pretty funky take with more jazziness than the original. The covers of Carole King’s “I feel the earth move” and Arthur Conley’s “Funky street” are also good ones. Rest of the songs are groovy jazz numbers such as “Blues down” and “Moogie mood”. Now that Hoctor Records has bankcrupted there’s no possibility to get exact info when this was released but around 1972 should be quite close.

We found this Lp during a trip to Miami,enjoy!!!