Colored Lights ONE And Then We Wrote B roadway''s longest-running music-and-lyrics team, John Kander and Fred Ebb marked the fortieth anniversary of their collaboration with a series of conversations aimed at chronicling their careers. These discussions took place over the kitchen table in Ebb''s home, an elegant retreat on Manhattan''s Central Park West where the songwriters have worked during most of their years together. A few blocks away in Kander''s brownstone, one of the living room walls displays a piece of memorabilia that aptly defines their enduring relationship. Mounted inside a glass frame is a huge enlargement of a crossword puzzle with one highlighted clue: "Partner of Ebb." The answer circled below the puzzle reads "John Kander." Fred Ebb, the son of Harry and Anna Evelyn (Gritz) Ebb, was born April 8, 1936, in Manhattan. He graduated from New York University in 1955 and received a master''s degree in English literature from Columbia University in 1957. John Kander, the son of Harold and Bernice (Aaron) Kander, was born in Kansas City, Missouri, on March 18, 1927.

He graduated from Oberlin College in 1951, and later earned an M.A. at Columbia, where he studied composition with Jack Beeson, Otto Luening, and Douglas Moore. Kander began his career in 1956 as the pianist for The Amazing Adele and An Evening with Beatrice Lillie. He later prepareddance arrangements for Gypsy and Irma la Douce. In 1962 Kander co-wrote A Family Affair with James and William Goldman and made his Broadway debut as a composer. That same year Kander met Ebb, who was writing special material for nightclub acts and contributing to revues, including Vintage 1960, Put It in Writing, and From A to Z. Ebb also wrote for the satirical television show That Was the Week That Was.

Referring to their songs, Kander says, "I think when we''re at our best we sound like one person." But when they reminisce with each other, as they do here, two distinct voices can be heard: Kander, the unflappable Midwesterner, mild-mannered and buoyantly optimistic, and Ebb, the acerbic New Yorker who wears his wit and insecurities on his sleeve. The longevity of their collaboration rests in part on the fact that while the two may often disagree, they have never had a serious fight or falling out since they started working together. Their dialogue is at times like one of their musicals, as either may be prompted to break into song and Kander may dash to the piano at any moment to provide accompaniment. In this first conversation, the songwriters recall the years leading up to their partnership.     JOHN KANDER: I remember very distinctly the first piece of music I wrote. I was in the second grade, and my teacher, Miss Mathews, asked me a question in arithmetic class that I wasn''t able to answer. I was in the back of the room, naturally, and she said, "What are you doing?" I told her, "I''m writing a Christmas carol.

" She obviously assumed that was a dodge and came over to my desk. There was my Christmas carol, written in large scrawled notes with lyrics about Jesus and the manger. She had me stay after class and she played it on the piano. The school choir later sang it at a Christmas assembly. But I didn''t find out until yearslater that my teacher had called my parents to say, "I just want to tell you that John wrote a Christmas carol. Is that all right? I know that you''re Jewish." I grew up in a Jewish family that had been in Kansas City, Missouri, for a number of generations, so being a Jewish family meant practically nothing except that we knew we were Jewish. We were much less tied to the traditional Jewish neuroses, those famous neuroses that supposedly exist.

There were a couple of rabbis in the family, but we only observed on the High Holy Days, and we also celebrated Christmas. FRED EBB : The impression I have of your family is that they encouraged your interest in music and theater, whereas mine did not. KANDER: My family was supportive by nature, and I was fortunate in that way. I was born in 1927, and music was an interest that I had from the time I was four. But my whole family loved music. My father loved to sing. He had a big, booming baritone voice, and after dinner we would often gather in the living room. I would play the piano and my father would sing.

My brother, Edward, liked to sing, and my aunt played the piano. My mother was tone-deaf, but she had rhythm. After we finished making music, Dad would sometimes say, "Play a march for your mother." Then I would play a march and my mother would get up and march around her chair. Another of my early memories is of my aunt Rheta putting her hands over my hands on the keys. That made a chord, and as a boy, it was about the most thrilling thing that ever happened to me. Music in our home was just fun. There were no professionals.

In those days we made music to entertain ourselves. The kind of encouragement that I received over the years was essentially just to keep making music as long as it was fun. We were never very achievement-oriented, and I was never pushed into having a career. I didn''t have any great drive to become a professional musician.Thinking as a Midwesterner, I would say that for my parents'' generation, music as family entertainment in the home was a perfectly normal activity, and in our home it flourished. Many homes had pianos. Radio existed when I was boy but certainly not television, and recordings were expensive. I grew up at a time when even among people who were not artistically inclined there was a healthy respect for the arts and a belief shared by everyone in my family that if you were going to be a whole personality, music and theater were activities that you enjoyed.

There were music-appreciation classes and concerts, but there was also a thoughtfulness about what art meant and how it enriched people''s lives. The Philharmonic gave a series of children''s concerts that we went to, and this was Kansas City in the thirties, not New York. My father and my grandparents had a certain knowledge that came to them through their schooling of what theater was, what opera was, not that they were heavy thinkers about any of this. Music and theater were simply a part of their world. I think those cultural differences in our backgrounds affect the two of us more than anything else. EBB: Growing up Jewish and lower middle class in New York City, I never had a hint of that kind of culture. As a boy, I had very little exposure to the arts. I would not have known what Philharmonic meant.

I had no idea what an opera or a concert hall looked like until much later in life. KANDER : My mother''s father had a poultry- and eggprocessing business, and my father worked for him. They had plants in several places in Missouri and Kansas, and my brother and I often drove with my father to visit them. My father''s entire emphasis, the joy of his life, was his family. He adored my mother and loved his kids and also loved to have a good time. My parents had a passionate relationship up until the day my father died in 1949, and they were both people who believed that you ought to try to be happy and make the best of any situationyou encountered. They passed that down to their two sons. My brother and I are extremely close.

Edward is three and a half years older and loves theater and music but has no particular talents in that direction. I''ve felt a little guilty at times having established my life in the theater, but he''s been very gracious about my career. When we would go to the theater together as boys, my parents would be sitting between us and the lights would go down and instinctively we would lean forward and look at each other. EBB: That''s right out of Norman Rockwell. KANDER : It may be a cliché, but it was true. EBB: Oh, I''m envious of all of that. I have nothing like that in my life. Looking back, I can honestly say I don''t believe my mother and father ever touched each other in my presence.

I never saw them kiss or embrace. He worked in a store on East Broadway selling clothes on the installment plan. When he came home, he would sit down with a newspaper and pay no attention to my mother until he was called for dinner. They stayed together with their children as their only common interest, me and my two sisters, Norma and Estelle, who were both more than ten years older than I was. I never saw my father pick up a book. He had no interest whatsoever in anything that would have interested me. I don''t mean to judge. He did the best he could, as hardworking as he was.

I remember that he entered me in some talent contests in Atlantic City. I know I was little and I guess I was sort of cute. I would stand on a table and sing "Shuffle Off to Buffalo." I always won the twenty-five dollars and my father would take the money from me. That was the end of that. I remember one night the door opened and two cops were standing there with my father. He had been in an automobile accident on the Queensborough Bridge. All the women in the family were screaming and yelling, "Poor Pop!" He walked in, and I think it all confounded him.

I was just a little bitty thing, but I remember the blood on his faceand the two cops bringing him in. I guess if I were in analysis I would tell that story pretty quick. He was only fifty-two when he died, or was it fifty-four? I think more than anything else his business finally killed him. Neither my father nor anyone else in my family had any inclination toward music or theater. My interest came about from listening to recordings that I would play and play until they turned white. I was always bewildered by the prospect.