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157 11 1961–1962—Release Not long after Tadd Dameron was released from prison, Groove Music, a publishing company held by Blue Note records, registered copyrights for seven of his tunes, including one titled“Bevan Beeps,”named for the son of Maely Dufty. By the fall of 1961,Tadd and Maely were known to be socializing as a couple,and the following April they would take an apartment together and start a publishing company of their own. Tadd told his friends Edgar and Barbara Blakeney that Maely claimed her child Bevan was his son. The boy was around four or five years old at the time of Dameron’s release, which would mean that any affair with Tadd would have started in 1957, before his federal arrest. While Tadd was not convinced the boy was his,1 and his exact relationship to the boy remains unclear, the possibility of his being Bevan’s father establishes a likely starting point for Tadd and Maely’s relationship. Following his time away from music,Tadd was anxious to restart his career. Maely, who had been on the jazz scene for some time in various professional supportive roles, had the connections and drive to help him with this. One of her former husbands, newspaperman Bill Dufty, whose name she still used at this time, had helped Billie Holiday write her autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues. It is the opinion of many observers who knew the Duftys that this arrangement had been brokered by Maely. Pianist George Ziskind, who got to know Tadd well enough in these last years to be a frequent dinner guest at the Dameron/Dufty home, recalled that Maely seemed to know everyone. For instance , George invited Tadd and Maely to the taping of a television program featuring Duke Ellington that a friend of his was producing. George thought he 158 DaMeroNIa would impress his guests, but as the three of them entered the studio, Duke and Maely commenced blowing each other kisses.2 Dan Morgenstern, who grew friendly with Tadd shortly after his release, remembered Maely as a“Hungarian Jewish girl. I don’t know what her original name was,” recalled Morgenstern.“Maely had these big dark eyes, nice hair, and a pretty face, but she was fat, like Mildred Bailey size, and she was a rather dominating personality....She was quick-witted and had a pretty sharp tongue. She had pretty strong likes and dislikes, nothing in between.”3 Morgenstern, Tadd, and Maely were part of a social circle that included Danish émigrés Chris Albertson and Timme Rosenkrantz. The latter of the two had set up the Don Redman tour of Europe in 1946. Morgenstern said of his fellow Danes, “They never had any money, but they always had great parties , with lots of musicians . . . and at one of those parties Tadd played quite a lot of piano.” It was also at this piano that Dameron recorded several selections in late October or early November. Albertson had hired an engineer to record a session featuring guitarist Bernard Addison at his apartment. After the Addison session, the engineer left his recorder, preferring to retrieve it a couple of weeks later, and Albertson used the machine to record Dameron one day when he came by to visit. The recording of Dameron did not take up the entire reel of tape (the only one Albertson had at the time), and Lil Hardin Armstrong, with whom Albertson was writing a book, came by later and performed some songs on the remaining unrecorded tape.Albertson let Armstrong take the tape home with her, on the condition that she send the reel back once she had the songs copied to another tape. Even though Albertson and Armstrong continued to work on the book together, the tape seems to have been forgotten and subsequently lost.4 The Lost Session Dameron’s return to actual studio recording came on December 14, 1961, when Blue Note recorded him leading a septet in four titles: “Lament for the Living ,”“Bevan Beeps,”“Aloof Spoof ” (all three registered by Groove in October), and Sam Rivers’s“The Elder Speaks.” The project was never finished, but these four titles were finally released in 1999.5 Michael Cuscuna, in the notes to that CD,describes the recordings as“less than polished.”While this criticism may be overstated, there were at least thirty-one takes—an unusually high number for a session yielding only four tunes, which suggests many false starts and aborted...

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