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?

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.

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.

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 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.

[2] 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.

[6] 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.

[7] 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[8] and The War on Poverty[9] for the prominent film maker Henry Hampton, the highly influential Ric Burns documentary The Donner Party[10][11] which won a Peabody in 1992, and the Emmy- and Peabody-winning film The Battle of the Bulge, for Oscar-winning director Thomas Lennon.

[12] 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[13] for New Line Cinema, and Illtown for director Nick Gomez.

In addition to continuing to score Emmy-winning documentaries like Ric Burns' Ansel Adams,[17] 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 Emmy- and Peabody-winning HBO sports documentaries in the early 2000s.

[19] In 2006, Keane scored Thomas Lennon and Ruby Yang's The Blood of Yingzhou District, which won an Academy Award for Best Documentary: Short Subject.

[22] In 2007, Brian received Emmy nominations for his scores to HBO's Barbaro, Mickey Mantle and Johnson McKelvey's Kabul Girls Club.

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.

Keane also scored a critically hailed two-hour PBS special documentary by film maker Gretchen Sorin, working with Ric Burns, called Driving While Black.

In an era where most television and film production took place in New York or Los Angeles, he was able to develop his substantial career simply through the notoriety and emotional power of his music.