RITA REYS - The Cool Voice Of Rita Reys + Jazz Messengers & Wessel Ilcken Combo

	£		75
	$		99

Here's something rather special and sublime!
RITA REYS Six tracks with Wessel Ilcken Combo, the other half dozen with The Jazz Messengers.
ORIGINAL Dutch Philips B08006L (1958?). MONSTER RARITY!!
Europe's First Lady Of jazz.
Here's what Wiki has to say:
Rita Reys (born Maria Everdina Reijs; 21 December 1924 – 28 July 2013) was a jazz singer from the Netherlands. At the 1960 French jazz festival of Juan-les-Pins, she received the title, "Europe's first lady of jazz".[1]

Reys was born in Rotterdam in 1924 into an artistic family. Her father was a violin player and conductor, her mother a dancer.[citation needed] At home, she heard hardly any jazz as her parents preferred light classical music, so Reys grew up hearing Tchaikovsky and Chopin. As a teenager, she nonetheless entered and won many local talent competitions.

In 1943, aged 18, she met her first husband, jazz drummer Wessel Ilcken, who introduced her to the jazz scene. Rita Reys & the Wessel Ilcken Sextet, featuring Jerry van Rooijen on trumpet and Toon van Vliet on tenor saxophone, regularly performed at the Sheherezade jazz club in Amsterdam and other Dutch stages. In the following years, Reys and Ilcken performed in other parts of Europe. They performed with Ted Powder in Belgium and Luxembourg in 1945 and 1946 and they toured Spain and North Africa with the Piet van Dijk orchestra between 1947 and 1950. In 1950 Reys and Ilcken founded their own combo, the Rita Reys Sextet, with which they would celebrate many successes in the following years, both in the Netherlands and in other European countries. The groups first concert was on 1 April that of that year, in the Amsterdam Palace club. But most of the time the sextet performed outside of the Netherlands. In England they played on American army bases and in several dance clubs, where Reys met people like saxophonist Ronnie Scott.[citation needed]

In 1953, the couple moved for six months to Stockholm, Sweden where Reys made her first recordings for the Swedish record label Artist. On 2 March 1953, they recorded for the first time with the baritone saxophonist Lars Gullin. Six months later, they returned to the studio with the Ove Lind sextet. Reys and Wessel also attended some recording sessions with which Quincy Jones was involved for the Artist label, featuring Gullin, Clifford Brown, and Art Farmer. It was in Stockholm that Reys met Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie, Oscar Peterson and Lester Young for the first time.[citation needed]

After their period in Sweden, Reys and Ilcken returned to the Netherlands, where Rita contributed to Jazz Behind The Dikes, an album featuring contemporary Dutch jazz talent. Her rendition of "My Funny Valentine" was her big break in her homeland.[citation needed] Columbia record producer George Avakian, who had heard her sing at the Sheherezade club, invited her to visit the United States. She gladly accepted his invitation and in 1956 she visited New York on her own (Wessel was unable to get a visa owing to his smoking of cannabis). She recorded half of an album in with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers. The Cool Voice of Rita Reys which also features Horace Silver, Hank Mobley and Donald Byrd.

Reys returned to America a year later, where again she performed at the Village Vanguard, this time with the Chico Hamiltongroup. She also played with a few other musicians, including Oscar Pettiford, Zoot Sims and Clark Terry. In Teddy Powell's Lounge Rita performed with jazz organist Jimmy Smith for a week. She briefly worked in Toronto at the Town Tavern. After that, back in New York, she performed with Herbie Mann and Oscar Pettiford. Recordings for the Dawn label were made with Milt Hinton on bass, Osie Johnson op drums and Mat Matthews on accordion. Shortly after her return to the Netherlands, Wessel Ilcken, Reys husband died of a brain hemorrhage. Nevertheless, Rita quickly returned to work in order to support herself and her daughter.[citation needed]

Europe's First Lady Of Jazz[edit]

In the Netherlands, Reys started to perform more regularly with the trio of pianist Pim Jacobs, whom she already knew from his playing with Ilcken. After a performance in the city of Groningen, during the drive back home in a minivan, he suddenly proposed to her, while guitarist Wim Overgaauw and Pim’s brother, bassist Ruud Jacobs, were sleeping in the back.[citation needed] Their "marriage in jazz" even made news headlines. On their wedding day, the mayor of Hilversum (one of the Dutch music ’headquarters’) presented the happy couple with the first copy of their album Marriage in Modern Jazz (the album that would win Reys her first Edison award).[citation needed]

That same year, Reys and the Pim Jacobs Trio won the Juan Les Pins Jazz Festival in France, where she was named Europe’s first lady of jazz, a title she would carry with grace for the rest of her career.[citation needed] The 1960s ended with one of the greatest high points in her career: in 1969 she was the first Dutch jazz singer to perform at the New Orleans Jazz Festival, where she played with, among others, Zoot Sims and Milt Hinton, accompanied by Jacobs on piano.[citation needed] She became a Citizen of Honor of New Orleans in 1980.[citation needed]