One of the f ew Broadway songwriting teams to have survived from the 1960s into the 1990s, John Kander and Fred Ebb have had numerous hits on stage and screen, including Cabaret, New York, New York, and Chicago.
Lyricist Fred Ebb was born in 1932 in New York City. His parents’ household held little in the way of music, but he fell in love with Broadway after seeing an Al JOLSON musical comedy. He worked a variety of odd jobs, including bronzing baby shoes, while writing humorous verse in his spare time. A lady trumpeter friend introduced him to songwriter Phil Springer, who helped train the budding lyricist. Springer, in turn, introduced Ebb to the Brill Building, which functioned as N ew York’s song factory in the 1950s and 1960s. One of Ebb’s first assignments was writing a song for actress Judy GARLAND, the mother of one of the most valuable future stars of Kander and Ebb’s output, Liza Minnelli.
Composer John Kander was b o rn in 1927 in Kansas City, Missouri, to a family fond of singing. He began to study the piano at the age of six. His teacher also instilled in h im a love of opera. As a young man, he moved to the East Coast. He got work subbing for the pianist in a Philadelphia preview of West Side Story, and was asked by choreographer Jerome Robbins to develop dance arrangements for the new Jule STYNE-Stephen SONDHEIM musical, Gypsy.
Music publisher Tommy Valando, who published both Kander and Ebb, suggested they team up. Their first song, “My Coloring Book,” became a hit for Barbra STREISAND and a feature of the repertoire of other pop singers in the early 1960s. The pair’s 1965 Broadway debut, Flora the Red Menace, featured characteristically off-beat characters and situations. The title role was sung and danced by Liza Minnelli.
The follow-up, which came a year later, was the darker Cabaret. It was far more successful and moved from Broadway to become Kander and Ebb’s first hit movie, starring Minnelli and Joel Gray, in 1972. Kander and Ebb had already made their Hollywood debut in 1970 with the soundtrack music for Something for Everyone.
There followed several less successful Broadway shows and a couple of showcases for their bestknown and most devoted performers. These included Liza Minnelli’s Liza with a Zon television in 1972, and Barbra Streisand’s movie Funny Lady in 1975. Their 1977 movie New York, New York starred Minnelli and Robert De Niro, and gave Frank SINATRA one of his biggest hits. Kander also provided the soundtrack for the movies Kramer vs. Kramer (1979) and Places in the Heart (1984), among others.
After a long period without a solid success, Kander and Ebb scored another hit o n Broadway with the Latin American flavoured musical adaptation of Kiss of the Spider Woman in 1993. A few years earlier, an off- Broadway review called And the World Goes Roundprovided indelible and, to some, surprising proof of the breadth, passion, and talent of the l ow profile songwriters, drawing on their hits and on choice numbers from lesser known shows.
In 1996, a revival of Chicago, the pair’s 1975 tale of murder and jury tampering, proved a hit, far surpassing the popularity of the original. The show toured internationally, thrusting the reticent pair back into the limelight and introducing their music to a whole new audience. In the late 1990s, Kander and Ebb continued to work together on n ew projects, most notably a musical entitled Now and Then.
Jeff Kaliss
SEE ALSO:
FILM MUSICALS; MUSICALS.
FURTHER READING
Kislan, Richard. The Musical: A Look at the American Musical Theater (New York: Applause Theater Books, 1995).
SUGGESTED LISTENING
And the World Goes Round; Cabaret; Chicago; Funny Lady; Liza with a Z; New York, New York; Now and Then.