[1] His francophone parents, Harold Breau and Betty Cody, were professional country and western musicians who performed and recorded from the mid-1930s until the mid-1970s.

[3][4] Around 1959 Breau left his parents' country band after his father slapped him in the face for incorporating jazz improvisation into his playing with the group.

In 1961, Breau had his first professionally recorded jazz session at the age of twenty at Hallmark Studios in Toronto, where he was accompanied by future members of The Band bassist Rick Danko and drummer Levon Helm.

[6] In 1962, Breau briefly performed in the Toronto-based jazz group Three with singer and actor Don Francks, and Eon Henstridge on acoustic bass.

They recorded a live album at the Village Vanguard in New York City and appeared on the Jackie Gleason and Joey Bishop television shows.

[7] In 1963 and 1964, Breau appeared at David Ingram's Fourth Dimension at 2000 Pembina Highway in Fort Garry, a suburb of Winnipeg.

Other regulars at the club on Sunday nights included Neil Young and his band The Squires, and Randy Bachman, who was heavily influenced by Breau, particularly evident in the jazz guitar style of his The Guess Who hit "Undun".

Breau left Winnipeg in 1976 and spent the last few years of his life in the United States, living in Maine, Nashville, Stockton, California, and New York City, eventually settling in Los Angeles in 1983.

Due to efforts by Randy Bachman of Guitarchives, Paul Kohler of Art of Life Records, Tim Tamashiro of CBC Radio and others, a new generation of listeners has access to his music.

This Gemini Award-winning[15] film includes interviews with Chet Atkins, Ted Greene, Pat Metheny, George Benson, Leonard Cohen, and Bachman, as well as family members.

The biography One Long Tune: The Life and Music of Lenny Breau by Ron Forbes-Roberts[1] was published in 2006 containing interviews with nearly 200 people and a comprehensive discography.

[19] Breau's fully matured technique was a combination of Chet Atkins's and Merle Travis's fingerpicking and Sabicas-influenced flamenco, highlighted by right-hand independence and flurries of artificial harmonics.

A lot of the stuff I play on the seven-string guitar is supposed to be technically impossible, but I spent over twenty years figuring it out.