Rita Reys

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Rita Reys (Concertgebouw, 1960)
Rita Reys (2004)

Rita Reys (nee Maria Everdina Reijs * 21st December 1924 in Rotterdam , † 28. July 2013 in Breukelen ) was a Dutch jazz - singer .

Life

Rita Reys came from a musical family; the father was a violinist and the mother a revue dancer. She won several singing competitions in Rotterdam and appeared in 1939 with the "Hawaiian Minstrels" and in 1941 with the orchestra of Johny Jansen. In 1943 she met the drummer Wessel Ilcken (1923–1957), whom she married in 1945 (a daughter Leila was born in 1954) and through whom she came to jazz. She came to Tangier with Louis van Dijk and toured a lot in US Army clubs in Germany in the early 1950s. Reys and Ilcken also moved to Stockholm, where they recorded with Lars Gullin in 1953 .

They came to New York City in 1955 through the agency of producer George Avakian , who she heard during one of their appearances with the Ilcken / Reys sextet at Scheherezade in Amsterdam. There she recorded with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers (with Hank Mobley , Horace Silver , Donald Byrd ) "The cool voice of Rita Reys" (recorded in 1956, released in 1957 by Columbia ), her debut album, which also included recordings in Holland Ilcken's trio are. She performed in Birdland and a year later in 1957 with Chico Hamilton in Village Vanguard .

After Ilcken died from a cerebral hemorrhage in 1957, she recorded with the Swedish pianist Bengt Hallberg ("Two Jazzy People") in 1958 and performed with Kurt Edelhagen in Germany, and around the same time a couple of times with Lester Young in France. She then performed with the former pianist from Ilcken's trio, Pim Jacobs (1935–1996), whom she married in 1960. Accordingly, the joint album from 1960 is called "Marriage in Modern Jazz" (with the Pim Jacobs Trio of Ruud Jacobs on bass and Wim Overgaauw on guitar). She toured with Pim Jacobs in the 1960s and made numerous records for Philips (with which she was under contract from 1955 to 1970) and in the 1970s for CBS. In 1960 she was announced as "First Lady of European Jazz" during a performance at the Juan les Pins jazz festival , a designation that stuck to her.

She performed in New Orleans in 1965 (with Zoot Sims , Clark Terry and Milt Hinton ), but otherwise toured almost exclusively in Europe. At a jazz festival in Prague, where u. a. Joachim-Ernst Berendt was on the jury, she received an award for best singer. In 1966 she sang with the Oliver Nelson big band . From 1966 she and her husband had a jazz club "Go-Go-Club" 15 km outside Amsterdam in the countryside in Loosdrecht , where she performed regularly. With the arranger Rogier van Otterloo she recorded various songbook albums from the 1970s, e. B. on Henry Mancini , Burt Bacharach , Antônio Carlos Jobim (1997), George Gershwin , Michel Legrand . In 1985 she survived breast cancer.

Rita Reys (2009)

Rita Reys actually wanted to end her career at the North Sea Jazz Festival in 1996 (because of the death of Pim Jacobs she had to cancel the performance and did it a year later), but performed with great success until shortly before her death (2013).

In 1991 she received the Bird Award at the North Sea Jazz Festival for her complete oeuvre . She received the Edison Prize five times , a. a. 1960 for the albums "Marriage in Modern Jazz" and 1969 for "Rita Reys Today". In 2006 she received the "Oeuvre Edison" for her life's work. She also received three gold records and an award in 1992 for the distribution of the Great American Songbook by the US Ambassador to the Netherlands. In 1981 she became a Knight of the Order of Orange-Nassau .

literature

  • Rita Reys, Bert Vuisje Lady Jazz , 2004 (Dutch)
  • Osterhausen, Jazz Podium , December 2005

Web links

Commons : Rita Reys  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Obituary at ORF
  2. ^ Reissued in "Lars Gullin, Volume 2" by Dragon Records . Also in I got rhythm , Nederlandse Jazz Archief 2005
  3. ↑ That must have been 1959. The source is [1]
  4. ↑ and his trio partners Ruud Jacobs (bass), the brother of Pim Jacobs, and Wim Overgaauw, guitar
  5. ↑ The recordings have never been published. Rita Reys is also an Honorary Citizen of New Orleans
personal data
SURNAME Reys, Rita
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Dutch jazz singer
DATE OF BIRTH December 21, 1924
PLACE OF BIRTH Rotterdam , Netherlands
DATE OF DEATH July 28, 2013
Place of death Breukelen