The new Deathblow album was officially released on October 11, 2025, only 13 years after it was recorded. Let me explain…
In September 2011 I started teaching at Berklee College of Music in Boston. I was hired six weeks before I started, and it turned everything in my life upside down. The students I was traveling to teach lessons to were given the option of coming to my place for lessons (mind you, that was four blocks from the subway, and the first stop in Queens after Manhattan), but no one was interested in traveling 20 minutes to do that. I had also been offered a fellowship at a Jewish women’s center called Drisha, and I was really looking forward to that, but it wasn’t going to fit in my schedule any longer.
I had already planned on recording Deathblow, but Bennett Studios (where I recorded pretty much every album I ever made up to that time) had closed, and the options were slim. Jazz musicians were starting to head to New Jersey to record at Tom Tedesco’s studio; the price was right and he even included video that was taking during the session. So in November 2011, I bought a hard drive and we all piled in the car and headed out to NJ to make a record.
We had some gigs after that, but around the same time I had formed the Long Island City Jazz Alliance, a non-profit that was focused on musicians in Queens, and we started doing these gigs in the neighborhood with Queens-based musicians. That morphed into the Queens Jazz OverGround, and I was hosting a weekly jam session. QJOG also started putting together these annual festivals at Flushing Town Hall that were a ton of work, and I was applying for grants for that.
It also didn’t help that my second semester at Berklee, my host in Boston, the wonderful Mira Band, was diagnosed with inoperable cancer. She was like a mother to me, and the news of her condition (and subsequent passing a year later) was painful. So I was pretty distracted with all of that.
When I finally got around to mixing the album, I learned that the hard drive was corrupt. This was solved by my brilliant downstairs neighbor, J Walter Hawkes, who pulled the music off of the drive using Linux, this free operating system. It took eighteen hours, but Walter was able to save the music.
This turned into me trying to shop the album for a label, unsuccessfully. So it sat around some more, life kept being busy, I was going back and forth between Boston and New York almost weekly.
I also made two albums for Posi-Tone Records, Glitter and Lioness, played some summer jazz festivals, recorded and released another Pirkei Avot album.
And then that pandemic thing happened. Remember that?
Finally, I decided that it was time to revive Genevieve Records, the label I had started in 2003 when I released my first CD, amanda monaco 4. And that I would release it on vinyl with a download card. And then I asked my first cousin once removed, Mia Monaco-Lizotte, who’s a very talented visual artist, to design the cover, which she did.
Then it was time to book an album release concert. I tried diligently for five months to do so and not a single club in NYC would get back to me. So I rented some space at Michiko and the release happened there. The advantage of this is that all of my bandmates could do it, and it was at a reasonable hour (Saturday, October 11 at 5 p.m.)
We had a great audience – a lot of family and friends and former students were in attendance – and the music was perfect, just so much fun and adventure and groove.
And now it’s “rinse and repeat” time: booking more gigs, getting press for the record, reaching out to radio stations and getting the music out there. Living the dream, baby!!
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