Researching Brian Keane

Brian 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.”

Brian 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 Brian 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, Vieux Diop, 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, was recently inducted into the New England Music Hall of Fame along with Muddy Waters and James Cotton, and is the only composer to have ever swept all the Emmy nominations for music in a single year.