Brian Keane (US film composer, producer & musician)

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 in a duo with Larry Coryell. 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. By the 1990s The Hollywood Reporter respectfully called him "the John Williams of the documentary". 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. 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. 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. 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 150 records in his career, 37 of which were Billboard Top Ten charting. With a career spanning well over 40 years, scoring over 700 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. Keane was born January 18, 1953, in Philadelphia. His mother, Winifred Keane, was an avant garde composer, and his father George F. Keane was a businessman. Keane had two siblings. Keane grew up in Westport, Connecticut, and played his first professional job as a rock n' roll musician in the sixth grade. 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 jazz guitarist, touring worldwide and recording for several years in a guitar duo with Larry Coryell, and eventually becoming a Blue Note recording artist. 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. 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. That early success led to several more scoring opportunities for Keane in the 1980s, an era where few documentaries were scored with original music. 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. 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 collaborations with Middle Eastern musician Omer Faruk Tekbilek. 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 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. In 1997, Keane started working with Hollywood agent Bruce Teitell, and scored several feature films including The Vernon Johns Story: Road to Freedom with James Earl Jones; Stephen King's The Night Flier for New Line Cinema, and Illtown for director Nick Gomez. He continued scoring documentaries as well, with the award-winning Burns mini series and Shanachie double CD soundtrack The Way West, Thomas Lennon's Oscar-nominated and Peabody Award-winning The Battle Over Citizen Kane, the award-winning PBS Nova series A Science Odyssey, and more award-winning American Experience documentaries for its new executive producer Margaret Drain. American Experience won Primetime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Non-Fiction Series in both 1998 and 1999. Also in 1999, Brian scored the multiple Emmy-winning Ric Burns series New York: A Documentary Film which, after the World Trade Center attack of September 11, 2001, became among the biggest selling documentary series of its time. In 1996, Keane was asked to score Spirit of the Games, a documentary on the Olympics by Emmy-winning director George Roy for HBO Sports. It began a long relationship with HBO Sports and a very successful run of sports documentaries including the Peabody-winning films Babe Ruth, Ali Frazier: One Nation Divisible, Dare to Compete and Fists of Freedom, which were part of a new series of documentaries entitled Sports of the 20th Century. Keane also scored HBO's Inside the NFL during that period. By the year 2000, Napster and other downloading entities were beginning to take over record distribution, and several long established record companies went out of business. In the space of just a year, the record producing business that Keane had enjoyed and accumulated over the previous decade and a half collapsed, along with most record companies. He was still among the most widely recognized composers for documentary film however, and by then, he had extended his notoriety to become a leading composer in the world of sports. In addition to continuing to score Emmy-winning documentaries like Ric Burns' Ansel Adams, Bill Moyers' Becoming American: The Chinese Experience collaborating with Chinese musician George Gao, and several more award-winning American Experience episodes for its new executive producer Mark Samels, Keane composed the music to many classic