Kander and Ebb | VU Curtains

Songwriting Duo Kander & Ebb

John Kander and Fred Ebb first met each other one fateful day in 1962 at the suggestion of their mutual music publisher Tommy Valando. Valando insisted that Kander and Ebb should meet each other, thinking they both would like each other. The songwriting duo hit it off immediately, with Ebb quoted as saying “I had a hunch that you would be good for me.”1 Their first song was entitled “Take Her, She’s Mine,” written for a musical of the same name. Unfortunately for the duo, the song was never picked up for the production, but in that moment, both Kander and Ebb knew they had a special connection to each other. “It was a case of instant communication and instant songs,” Ebb says. “Our neuroses complemented each other, and because we worked in the same room at the same time, I didn’t have to finish a lyric, then hand it over to you to compose it.”2 The work was equally split between the two of them, with Kander writing the music while Ebb wrote the lyrics. They have contributed to at least twenty musicals and films throughout their lifetime, with highlights including Cabaret (1966 & 1972), Chicago (1975 & 2002), New York, New York (1977), Kiss of the Spider Woman (1992), Curtains (2006), and The Scottsboro Boys (2010). Ebb unfortunately passed away at the age of 76 in September 2004, while Kander, 94 at the time of writing, is still alive today.

John Kander

Both Kander and Ebb were raised Jewish, with John being born (March 18, 1927) in Kansas City, Missouri, and Fred (April 8, 1928) in New York City, New York. Kander began piano lessons at the age of six, beginning his long career of accompanying and playing. The first piece of music he ever wrote was a Christmas song entitled “In a Manger” in 1937 at the age of ten, which caused concern from his teacher as she knew Kander and his family were Jewish. Kander’s first professional job was substitute pianist for West Side Story in Philadelphia in 1957 at the age of thirty, taking over Joe Lewis’s position. He recalls that, while attending an after-show party for West Side Story, he was having trouble mingling and getting a drink: “I’m convinced to this day that if I had been able to order my own drink at the Variety Club, I would never have had a career.”3 Shortly after, Kander was picked up to be rehearsal pianist for an up-and-coming musical entitled Gypsy, to which he was later asked by Jerry Robbins to personally write the dance arrangements. In addition to this, Kander had a partnership with the Goldman brothers (James and Williams) and created a handful of musicals together, many of which never received any attention. The one exception was A Family Affair, which “opened on Broadway on January 27, 1962, to mostly negative reviews and closed after only sixty-five performances. Most of the critics attacked the flimsy book and underdeveloped characters.”4 This was after a desperate attempt to save the show, evening convincing Hal Prince to read the script and listen to the score at the request of Stephen Sondheim. Prince liked the material, but the show just did not work for him to provide any help.

Kander continued on with his musical career before meeting Ebb, “working as a vocal coach, musical director, and rehearsal pianist. He also worked as musical director at the Warwick “musical tent,” as it was fondly called, from 1955 to 1957, conducting Broadway classics like Oklahoma! and Finian’s Rainbow.”5 He has been credited for writing the music to over eleven Hollywood and television films separate from his collaborations with Ebb. He is quoted as saying the film music “should tell you something that the dialogue is not telling you.”6 Throughout his career, Kander believed that “art should rise above the mundane and aspire to reach the audience on an emotional level.”7 In addition to musicals, Kander served as music director for a few plays produced by Tony Randall’s National Actors Theatre. These include The Crucible (1991) and Three Men on a Horse (1993).

Fred Ebb

Fred Ebb, while at NYU, attending a short-story seminar, which is where his love of writing began. He states, “Although I had no formal training in drama, by the time I finished college I wanted so much to be in the theatre, and I figured the only real chance for me to enter that world was to write lyrics.”8 The one musical that made the largest impact on his career was Guys and Dolls, being mesmerized at how each element came together in a cohesive story (A reference to Guys and Dolls can be found in the musical Curtains). One of Ebb’s first teachers was Phil Springer, who taught him everything he knew on lyrical form. The first taste of success came from a revue with Norman Martin called Put It in Writing, writing a song called “What Kind of Life is That?” that brought down the house every night with laughter. Ebb’s next partner prior to Kander was Paul Klein in the late 1950s, working on the Broadway revue From A to Z. They collaborated again with a musical entitled Morning Sun, but this, like most of their work, was a flop. Both Kander and Ebb met each other off the heels of Broadway flops, which motivated them to create something that had some staying power.

While working independently, Ebb’s work expressed a fascination with the entertainment world, usually incorporating a play-within-a-play (see Curtains). It is interesting to note that most of his TV specials were backstage musicals. His biggest muse while removed from Kander was Liza Minnelli, creating concerts, TV specials, and musicals that “were an extension of their personal relationship and a reflection of his own personality.”9 Minnelli’s career skyrocketed with her 1972 TV special Liza with a Z!, which was created by Bob Fosse and Fred Ebb after the filmed version of Cabaret was released. Kander helped write some specialty numbers for this special, too. Kander and Ebb’s relationship was so strong that Ebb even refused to work with Richard Rodgers as lyricist on Rex, while Kander refused to write a musical with his closest friend without Ebb’s help.

Composer and Lyricist Combined

After Kander and Ebb’s fateful encounter, they decided to work together and create music for TV specials, movies, and musicals. While mostly writing comedic songs, their first venture into a ballad was the song “My Coloring Book,” written for Sandy Stewart to sing on Perry Como’s TV show. The next day, they received “like 20,000 calls and messages”10 asking them about their work. This was their first taste at mainstream success. Another successful ballad came from the song “Maybe This Time,” written for Kaye Ballard. Ballard, a comedic singer, wanted to show that she could be taken seriously as a performer. Ebb states that “the idea was that maybe this time she would be able to perform a serious piece like that on TV.”11 This song would later be covered by Liza Minnelli in her nightclub act and featured in the musical Cabaret. Kander recalls their initial songwriting history, saying, “When we first began to work together we fell into a way of working that allowed us to enjoy what we were doing. We never made an intellectual decision about that. We just fell into a way of writing that was pleasurable.”12 Writing together seemed easy to Kander and Ebb, always having a good time while creating songs. Kander goes on to state, “We may write junk, tear it up, and then write it again, but the process of writing is never agonizing or depressing.”13

The duo commonly writes about people, not issues, with the will to survive the main motivation for these characters. As stated before, Ebb loves utilizing a show-within-a-show motif, which can be seen in many of their most popular shows like Cabaret and Curtains. Kander typically begins writing by immersing himself in the sounds of a particular period in which a show is set, like the late 1950s for Curtains. Of all the pieces they have written together, Kander’s favorite is The Rink, which “fared badly on Broadway in 1984 despite stellar performances from Liza Minnelli and Chira Rivera.”14 In a similar vein to the production staff members in Curtains, Kander and Ebb could not stand critics, with Ebb being particularly thin-skinned about criticism. They do offer an optimistic outlook on the world of musical theatre, with Kander saying “the beauty of the Broadway musical form is that it is so broad and inclusive, you are free to do whatever you want. […] The only thing you have to do is entertain an audience.”15 While not as successful apart from each other, Kander and Ebb were truly a force to be reckoned with when creating music together, with their ability to create lasting pieces of work a true testament to their collaboration efforts and everlasting friendship.

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