Brian 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.
Brian grew up in Westport, Connecticut and started his career as a guitarist, touring and recording with many well-known touring acts, including in a guitar duo with jazz great Larry Coryell, and eventually signed as a Capitol Blue Note recording artist. Being a world-renowned guitarist might have been Brian’s career, had becoming a multi-award-winning composer and Grammy-winning record producer not taken over.
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 boomed in the 1980s, Keane quickly became one of the most influential composers in the new field of documentary music scoring. By the 1990s, The Hollywood Reporter respectfully called him “the John Williams of the documentary.”
Brian has scored literally hundreds of films, worked with every major network, and many multi-award-winning filmmakers including Barry Levinson, Stephen King, Sheila Nevins, Ric Burns, Susan Lacy, and Henry Hampton, scoring some of the most memorable documentaries in television history. Keane set a new standard to scoring sports programming with his multi-award-winning work for HBO, ESPN, and CBS, and pioneered music for contemporary documentaries as the composer for ABC News Turning Point, the first prime-time network documentary series on television.
Brian has also scored the music to several feature films, his music has been played by top symphonies, he has mentored many top professionals in the music business, and his computer-searchable music catalog has been licensed by many major entertainment companies. Brian’s music is performed daily all over the world.
Brian’s career as a record producer began in the 1980s with his work with Larry Coryell, Omar Faruk Tekbilek, and others. Keane would become a leading producer of world music, working with artists as diverse as Linda Ronstadt, Pete Seeger, Taj Mahal, Michael Hedges, Buckwheat Zydeco, Cyrus Chestnut, John Sebastian, Arlo Guthrie, and The Clancy Brothers. Keane produced several gold and platinum albums and won a Grammy Award for his 1998 soundtrack to Long Journey Home: The Irish in America, featuring The Chieftains, Van Morrison, Sinéad O’Connor, and Elvis Costello, among others. Brian produced 37 Billboard Top Ten charting albums, with four Grammy nominations, among several hundred records.
With a career spanning over 50 years, as a world-touring recording artist, Grammy-winning record producer, and scoring hundreds of film and television shows garnering two Academy Awards, six nominations, 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 Grand Award, among six other composing awards, was inducted into the New England Music Hall of Fame in 2021, and remains the only composer to have ever swept all of the Emmy nominations for music in a single year.