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. At home, there was virtually no jazz music. Her parents preferred light classical music, so Rita grew up with the sounds of Tchaikovsky and Chopin.  As a teenager, Rita nonetheless entered and won many local talent competitions.

In the Netherlands, Rita started to perform more regularly with the trio of pianist Pim Jacobs, whom she already knew from his playing with Wessel.  After a show 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. 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 Rita her first Edison award).

That same year, Rita and the Pim Jacobs Trio won the Juan Les Pins Jazz Festival in France, where Rita was named Europe’s first lady of jazz, a title she would carry with grace for the rest of her career.  The 1960s ended with one of the greatest high points in Rita’s 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 Pim on piano.   She became a Citizen of Honor of New Orleans in 1980.

Read more at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rita_Reys

Eileen Brennan (September 3, 1932 – July 28, 2013) was an American actress of film, television, and theater. Brennan is best known for her role as Doreen Lewis in Private Benjamin, for which she received an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress. She reprised the role for the TV adaptation, winning both a Golden Globe and Emmy for her performance. She received Emmy nominations for her guest starring roles on Newhart, Thirtysomething, Taxi and Will & Grace.

Brennan was born Verla Eileen Regina Brennen on September 3, 1932 in Los Angeles, California, daughter of Regina “Jeanne” Menehan, a silent film actress, and John Gerald Brennen, a doctor. Of Irish descent, she was raised Roman Catholic.

Brennan also worked with director Robert Moore and writer Neil Simon, appearing in Murder by Death as Tess Skeffington (1976); and The Cheap Detective (1978). Both of these movies also starred James Coco, James Cromwell and Peter Falk. She had a starring role, playing ‘Mutha’ in the 1978 movie, FM, about rock radio.

In 1980, Brennan received a best supporting actress Oscar nomination for her role as Goldie Hawn’s nasty commanding officer in Private Benjamin. She reprised the role in the television adaptation (1981–1983), for which she won an Emmy (supporting actress) as well as a Golden Globe (lead actress). She has one additional Golden Globe nomination and six Emmy nominations.

Brennan received an Emmy nomination for her guest starring role in Taxi episode “Thy Boss’s Wife” (1981). Brennan guest starred on two Murder, She Wrote episodes, “Old Habits Die Hard” (1987) and “Dear Deadly” (1994), and in 1987 she also appeared in the Magnum, P.I. episode, “The Love That Lies”.

Read more at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eileen_Brennan

John Weldon Cale (December 5, 1938 – July 26, 2013), known as JJ Cale or J.J. Cale, was a Grammy Award-winning American singer-songwriter and musician. Cale was one of the originators of the Tulsa Sound, a loose genre drawing on blues, rockabilly, country, and jazz influences. Cale’s personal style has often been described as “laid back”.

Songs written by Cale that have been covered by other musicians include “After Midnight” and “Cocaine” by Eric Clapton, “Clyde” by Waylon Jennings and Dr. Hook, and “Call Me the Breeze” by Lynyrd Skynyrd.

Cale was born on December 5, 1938, in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. He was raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and graduated from Tulsa Central High School in 1956. Along with a number of other young Tulsa musicians, Cale moved to Los Angeles in the early 1960s, where he first worked as a studio engineer. Finding little success as a recording artist, he later returned to Tulsa and was considering giving up the music business until Clapton recorded Cale’s “After Midnight” in 1970. His first album, Naturally, established his style, described by Los Angeles Times writer Richard Cromelin as a “unique hybrid of blues, folk and jazz, marked by relaxed grooves and Cale’s fluid guitar and laconic vocals. His early use of drum machines and his unconventional mixes lend a distinctive and timeless quality to his work and set him apart from the pack of Americana roots-music purists.” In 2013 Neil Young remarked that of all the musicians he had ever heard, J.J. Cale and Jimi Hendrix were the two best electric guitar players.

Read more at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JJ_Cale