A Kansas City Childhood & the Power of the Piano

John Harold Kander was born on March 18, 1927, in Kansas City, Missouri, the second son of Harold and Bernice (Aaron) Kander. He grew up in what he has described as a loving, middle-class Jewish family, maintaining a lifelong close relationship with his older brother Edward, who went on to become a sales manager at a brokerage house in the city.

Kander traces his earliest musical impulse to a simple domestic habit. His interest in music began at age four, kindled by the family’s love of gathering around the piano to sing. It was not a formal education so much as an atmosphere — music as the natural texture of home life.

His first composition arrived during a second-grade mathematics class — a Christmas carol, remarkable in itself given his Jewish faith. His teacher, recognising its quality, discreetly sought permission from Kander’s parents before having the school choir perform it at a holiday assembly. That small, careful act of encouragement planted something lasting.

At age nine, his mother took him to his first opera performances when the San Carlo Opera visited Kansas City with productions of Verdi’s Aida and Puccini’s Madama Butterfly. The experience of those giants on the stage — even with visible beard-strings on the Egyptian soldiers — was, by his own account, the seed of his lifelong conviction that music exists to tell stories.

From Oberlin to Columbia — a Composer Forged

Kander attended Westport High School before transferring to the Pembroke Country-Day School. During World War II, he joined the U.S. Merchant Marine Cadet Corps, completing his training in California and sailing between San Francisco and Asia before leaving the Corps on May 3, 1946.

He enrolled at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, completing one semester before rule changes governing national service required him to enlist in the Army Reserves in September 1946. During the Korean War he was ordered back into active duty, but a medical examination revealed scars on his lungs, and he remained in New York City for six months of observation. He was officially discharged on July 3, 1957.

Kander graduated with a degree in music from Oberlin College in 1951, then pursued graduate studies at Columbia University — where he became a protégé of the distinguished composer Douglas Moore, and studied composition with Jack Beeson and Otto Luening. He earned his master’s degree from Columbia in 1953.

From the Rehearsal Room

Following his studies, Kander began conducting at summer theaters before taking up a position as rehearsal pianist for West Side Story — the landmark 1957 musical by Leonard Bernstein and Jerome Robbins. Working alongside Robbins proved formative: the choreographer encouraged Kander to compose dance music, a suggestion that shaped the direction of his entire career.

He went on to write dance arrangements for Gypsy (1959) and Irma la Douce (1960) — early credits that placed him at the heart of Broadway’s creative engine before he had composed a single show of his own.

Kander & Ebb — The Greatest Collaboration in Broadway History

In 1965, Kander and Ebb wrote their first Broadway show together: Flora the Red Menace, produced by the legendary Hal Prince, directed by George Abbott, and notable as the stage debut of Liza Minnelli. The Minnelli connection proved enduring: Kander and Ebb became the principal creative collaborators of her career, writing material for her stage appearances, television specials (including the Emmy Award-winning Liza with a Z in 1972), and her 1977 film New York, New York.

The team was equally associated with Chita Rivera, composing the scores for several of her landmark Broadway roles including Zorba, Chicago, The Rink, and Kiss of the Spider Woman.

Most famously, at the request of director Martin Scorsese and star Robert De Niro, Kander and Ebb wrote the dramatic title song for the 1977 film New York, New York — a song that became one of the most enduring standards in American popular music.

Fred Ebb died in 2004. Kander has spoken warmly and with great care about his late collaborator in numerous interviews, and has continued to compose in the years since, finding new creative partnerships while honouring the legacy of their work together.

The Two Crowning Masterpieces

Scholar James Leve examines both works at length in his musicological study of the Kander and Ebb collaboration, devoting chapters titled The Divinely Decadent Lives of Cabaret and Chicago: Broadway to Hollywood to the full creative and production histories of each. His insight that both works share Kander and Ebb’s distinctively self-aware theatrical voice holds throughout: both shows acknowledge the artifice of performance even as they wield it with devastating emotional effect.

The Broadway Catalogue

All lyrics by Fred Ebb unless otherwise noted. Kander’s complete Broadway and Off-Broadway record as composer spans six decades and encompasses 15 Broadway musicals, several Off-Broadway works, and an extensive body of film and television scores.

Beyond the Stage — Screen & Television

Kander and Ebb’s work extended far beyond Broadway, contributing songs and complete scores to feature films, television films, and television specials spanning four decades. Two of their Broadway musicals — Cabaret and Chicago — were adapted into landmark films, the latter winning the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2003.

Songs Written for Film

Film Scores

Television Specials

Kander and Ebb wrote extensively for television, producing material for several celebrated specials including Liza! (1970), Liza with a Z (1972 — Emmy Award winner), Ol’ Blue Eyes Is Back (1973, for Frank Sinatra), Gypsy in My Soul (1976, for Shirley MacLaine), Baryshnikov on Broadway (1980), Liza in London (1986), and Liza Minnelli: Live from Radio City Music Hall (1992).

A Life in the Theatre

The Man Behind the Music

A Career Recognised — Awards & Distinctions