1. Brian Keane was born on January 18,1953 and is an American composer, music producer, and guitarist.
34 Facts About Brian Keane
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Brian Keane grew up in Westport, Connecticut, and started his career as a guitarist, eventually touring and recording in a duo with Larry Coryell.
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Brian Keane 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.
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Brian 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.
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Brian 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.
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Brian Keane has received several other Grammy nominations as well.
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Brian Keane produced more than 150 records in his career, 37 of which were Billboard Top Ten charting.
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Brian Keane's mother, Winifred Keane, was an avant garde composer, and his father George F Keane was a businessman.
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Brian Keane grew up in Westport, Connecticut, and played his first professional job as a rock n' roll musician in the sixth grade.
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Brian Keane 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.
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Brian 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.
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In 1981, Brian 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.
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In 1989, Brian 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.
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In 1997, Brian 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.
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Brian Keane 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.
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Also in 1999, Brian Keane 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.
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In 1996, Brian Keane was asked to score Spirit of the Games, a documentary on the Olympics by Emmy-winning director George Roy for HBO Sports.
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Brian Keane 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.
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Brian Keane worked with producer Ross Greenburg, directors George Roy, Joe Lavine, and other Emmy-winning sports documentarians, and composed a number of Emmy-nominated and Peabody-winning films for ESPN as well such as Kentucky Bluegrass Basketball, The Complete Angler, You Write Better Than You Play, and David Halberstam's Teammates for directors Fritz Mitchell, Johnson McKelvey, Neil Leifer, and others.
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In 2001, Brian Keane became the first, and only composer in the history of the Emmys, to sweep all the Emmy nominations for music composition in a single year, and he won Emmys in 2002,2003, and 2004 for music composition as well.
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In 2006, Brian Keane scored Thomas Lennon and Ruby Yang's The Blood of Yingzhou District, which won an Academy Award for Best Documentary: Short Subject.
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In 2007, Brian Keane received Emmy nominations for his scores to HBO's Barbaro, Mickey Mantle and Johnson McKelvey's Kabul Girls Club.
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Brian Keane enjoyed a nonstop series of successes in the entertainment business for over two decades, but by 2008, the era of reality TV, digital media, and multi channel cable television was coming of age.
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Emmy judging was no longer monitored and, although he continued to score Emmy nominated films like Ric Burns' Into the Deep for American Experience, HBO's Joe Louis: A Hero Betrayed, and The Running Rebels of UNLV, as well as the 2011 Academy Award nominated documentary The Warrior of Quigang, Brian Keane decided to work less.
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In 2012, after scoring Death and the Civil War, which won the Erik Barnauw Award and received an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Non-Fiction Program, Brian Keane got a call from Oscar-winning director Barry Levinson to score the BBC America television series Copper about an Irish policeman, set in 1864 New York.
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Brian Keane produced an early music soundtrack to the 1922 Douglas Fairbanks Sr.
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In 2018 Brian Keane returned to sports with the 12-hour series Saturdays in the South for ESPN, which won two New York Festival Gold awards.
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Brian Keane returned to performing on guitar occasionally in 2017 following the death of his one time duo partner Larry Coryell, playing numerous tribute concerts at first, and eventually playing a wide variety of concerts, selling out Carnegie Hall in April 2018 with Omar Faruk Tekbilek, and touring internationally again, after almost 35 years, in 2019.
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In 2020, Brian Keane helped make a film about his long-time friend and accomplished guitarist Charlie Karp.
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Brian Keane scored a critically hailed two-hour PBS special documentary by film maker Gretchen Sorin, working with Ric Burns, called Driving While Black.
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In 2021, Brian Keane was inducted into the New England Music Hall of Fame.
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Brian Keane's studio is located in his first home in Monroe, CT which he bought in 1985, and converted into a recording studio in 1993.
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Brian Keane married Susan St Louis in 1987, who had a son, Chris Laskowski, born in 1971.
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Brian Keane has shared his home with actress, theatre producer and former high school classmate Bonnie Housner Erickson since 2015.