Brian Keane

Brian Keane (born January 18, 1953) is an American composer, music producer, and guitarist.

Keane has been described as "a musician's musician, a composer's composer, and one of the most talented producers of a generation" by Billboard magazine.

Keane grew up in Westport, Connecticut, and started his career as a guitarist, eventually touring and recording with several well-known artists, including in a duo with Larry Coryell.

Keane was born January 18, 1953, in Philadelphia.

His mother, Winifred Keane, is an avant garde composer, and his father George F. Keane, while being a successful business man, was also an Irish tenor.

Keane's brother, Geoffrey Keane, and his sister, Sheila Keane, are both musical as well.

Keane grew up in Westport, Connecticut and played his first professional job as a rock n' roll musician when he was still a sixth grader.

He studied privately with the late jazz pianist and Juilliard educator John Mehegan, and then with Czech composer Karel Husa at both Ithaca College, and Cornell where he attended school.

Keane began his professional career as a guitarist playing in clubs and as a sideman, and eventually became a world-renowned jazz guitarist, performing with many Jazz greats of the 1970s and 1980s, including touring worldwide and recording for several years in a guitar duo with Larry Coryell, and eventually becoming a Blue Note recording artist.

Brian played on hundreds of records, commercials and film scores as a guitarist beginning in the 1970s and has performed or recorded as a guitarist with artists as diverse as disco singer Vicki Sue Robinson, entertainer Eartha Kitt, the rock group Wishbone Ash, jazz bassist Eddie Gómez, jazz fusion group Spyro Gyra, flamenco guitarist Paco de Lucía, blues artist Taj Mahal, cajun icon Buckwheat Zydeco, classical clarinetist Richard Stoltzman, jazz saxophonist Marion Meadows, folk legend Pete Seeger, singers Linda Ronstadt, Bobby McFerrin, The Clancy Brothers, John Sebastian, and many others.

In the late 1970s, still making his living primarily as a guitarist, Keane met film directors Jim Burroughs and Suzanne Bauman, while working in his childhood friend Gary Scovil's recording studio in Norwalk, Connecticut.

Best known as a composer, Keane's first music score for a documentary came in 1980 with Against Wind and Tide: A Cuban Odyssey, which was nominated for an Academy Award.

As the cable television business bloomed in the 1980s, Keane quickly became one of the foremost pioneers in documentary music scoring.

Keane has worked with every major network, and many multi award-winning filmmakers including Barry Levinson, Ric Burns, Susan Lacy, Henry Hampton, Stephen King, and Thomas Lennon, scoring some of the most memorable documentaries in television history such as the epic Burns history of New York in New York: A Documentary Film, the inspiring story of the 1980 Olympic hockey team in Do You Believe in Miracles? and The Battle Over Citizen Kane.

Keane also pioneered a new approach to scoring sports programming with his innovative Emmy winning work for HBO and ESPN, and created the music for the groundbreaking ABC News Turning Point in the early days of prime-time documentaries.

In addition, Brian has scored the music to several feature films, his music catalog is licensed by most major entertainment companies, and his music is performed all over the world.

Keane would become a leading producer of world music in the 1980s and 1990s after that, working with artists as diverse as Linda Ronstadt, Pete Seeger, Joanie Madden, Taj Mahal, Michael Hedges, Buckwheat Zydeco, Yomo Toro, Cyrus Chestnut, David Darling, John Sebastian, Arlo Guthrie and The Clancy Brothers.

That early success led to several more scoring opportunities for Keane in the 1980s, an era where few documentaries were scored with original music.

After producing the classic Civil War mini series with his brother Ken Burns in the late 1980s, the highest rated television documentary series in history, Burns went on to work with Keane on the 1990 award-winning documentary Coney Island.

Keane has scored every one of Burns' award-winning films ever since, and their ongoing collaborations span three decades.

By the end of the 1980s, Keane had already established himself as the leading pioneer in scoring documentary films with The Hollywood Reporter calling him "the John Williams of the documentary".

In 1981, Keane scored his first documentary for them, Against Wind and Tide: A Cuban Odyssey, which was nominated for an Academy Award for best documentary in 1982.

Keane's prominence as a composer rose quickly, even as he continued to tour as a guitarist in a duo with Larry Coryell, and eventually as a solo artist with the release of his first solo CD Snowfalls in 1986.

It was a soundtrack release of his score to the 1987 documentary Süleyman the Magnificent that would launch Keane's career as a Grammy winning world music producer.

That score revolutionized Middle Eastern music and launched the career of Omar Faruk Tekbilek.

In 1987, Keane's score to the documentary Suleyman the Magnificent, was discovered by German publisher Eckart Rahn who heard the documentary on television, and decided to release a soundtrack CD of Keane's score on his Celestial Harmonies label.

The record, among the first to harmonize traditional Middle Eastern music, would form the first of a series of enduring and culturally important collaborations with Middle Eastern musician Omer Faruk Tekbilek, and the success of that CD would eventually lead to Brian becoming a prominent producer of ethnic and New Age recordings, both for Celestial Harmonies and a variety of major record labels.

In 1989, Keane scored the music to Chimps: So Like Us, the HBO Academy Award-nominated and Emmy-winning documentary that helped introduce the public to naturalist Jane Goodall.

The film was made by Oscar-winning directors Kirk Simon and Karen Goodman whose New York offices happened to be in the same building, one floor down, from the acclaimed filmmaker Ric Burns.

By the 1990s The Hollywood Reporter respectfully called him "the John Williams of the documentary".

The early 1990s saw Keane's composing career rise dramatically in stature with the multiple-award-winning General Motors' Playwright's Theatre series for Nederlander television, which ran for four years on A&E, the Emmy- and Columbia Dupont-winning miniseries The Great Depression and The War on Poverty for the prominent film maker Henry Hampton, the highly influential Ric Burns documentary The Donner Party which won a Peabody in 1992, and the Emmy- and Peabody-winning film The Battle of the Bulge, for Oscar-winning director Thomas Lennon.

Keane scored many award-winning films for the PBS history series American Experience, working with producer Judy Crichton, directors Carl Charlson, Ben Loeterman, Mark Zwonitzer and others.

He also scored several award-winning specials for National Geographic working with director Oren Jacoby, and again with the Simon and Goodman picture company.

In addition, he was hired by ABC News in the early 1990s to be the composer for the first prime-time, hour-long, news documentary series Turning Point.

Working with producers Rudy Bednar and Betsy West, Turning Point would become the first of several news documentary series he scored for ABC News in the 1990s, and the musical approach developed for ABC News has been adopted in many subsequent news documentary series.

Keane won a Grammy Award for his 1998 soundtrack Long Journey Home: The Irish in America with the Chieftains, Van Morrison, and Elvis Costello, among others.

He has received several other Grammy nominations as well.

Brian produced more than 300 records in his career, 37 of which were Billboard Top Ten charting.

With a career spanning well over 40 years, scoring over 470 film and television shows, garnering six Academy Awards, nine Peabody Awards, and over 70 Emmy Awards (18 of which won Emmys for Best Documentary or Series), as well as numerous other awards, Keane has received four Emmy Awards for music, and 20 Emmy nominations.

He is the recipient of the New York Festivals TV & Film Awards Grand Award, and was inducted into the New England Music Hall of Fame in 2021.