and Tide: A Cuban Odyssey, which was nominated for an Academy Award for best documentary in 1982. That early success led to several more scoring opportunities for Keane in the 1980s, an era where few documentaries were scored with original music. Keane's prominence as a composer rose quickly, even as he continued to tour as a guitarist in a duo with Larry Coryell, and eventually as a solo artist with the release of his first solo CD Snowfalls in 1986. In 1987, Keane's score to the documentary Suleyman the Magnificent, was discovered by German publisher Eckart Rahn who heard the documentary on television, and decided to release a soundtrack CD of Keane's score on his Celestial Harmonies label. The record, among the first to harmonize traditional Middle Eastern music, would form the first of a series of enduring and culturally important collaborations with Middle Eastern musician Omer Faruk Tekbilek, and the success of that CD would eventually lead to Brian becoming a prominent producer of ethnic and New Age recordings, both for Celestial Harmonies and a variety of major record labels. 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. The film was made by Oscar-winning directors Kirk Simon and Karen Goodman whose New York offices happened to be in the same building, one floor down, from the acclaimed filmmaker Ric Burns. After producing the classic Civil War mini series with his brother Ken Burns in the late 1980s, the highest rated television documentary series in history, Burns went on to work with Keane on the 1990 award-winning documentary Coney Island. Keane has scored every one of Burns' award-winning films ever since, and their ongoing collaborations span three decades. By the end of the 1980s, Keane had already established himself as the leading pioneer in scoring documentary films with The Hollywood Reporter calling him "the John Williams of the documentary". 1990s 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 and The War on Poverty for the prominent film maker Henry Hampton, the highly influential Ric Burns documentary The Donner Party which won a Peabody in 1992, and the Emmy- and Peabody-winning film