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". 　　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. 　　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.