Brian Keane, Dante, And Streaming Robots

Like so much of modern life, soundtrack releases are no longer simple.

Everything is streaming. Streaming is run by AI and robots, designed to make money based on immediate popularity.

That was a problem for Brian Keane. The 1971 Staples High School graduate — a noted Emmy- and Grammy-winning composer — worked on one of the most ambitious high art projects on television in years: “Dante: Inferno to Paradise.”

The 700-year-old story of one of the greatest works of literature in history debuted on PBS earlier this week.

Keane explains: “You have to release a track and hit it with promotion all at once. The robots recognize that people are listening, and push the music out to others in the hopes of making more money.” It works for Beyoncé and Taylor Swift.

Of course, the AI streaming robots don’t realize that — unlike Dante — today’s pop stars won’t be around 7 centuries from now, in 2724.

But the bots don’t care that if there is no potential immediate dollar return, no one will ever hear Dante’s soundtrack.

Keane has always taken a different path.

“I always believed in the enduring qualities of music,” he says. “Music is just a language, and you can communicate in that language on all kinds of levels.”

He has always taken risks, and avoided doing things the standard way.

However, he notes, “AI robots present a new challenge — not only to making a living, but to making people aware of long-term oriented, artful projects.

“It even presents a challenge to a musical legacy. In prior generations, great music was passed down by the written page. Now the format is digital. It changes every 5 years, and is controlled by robots, not people.”

Brian Keane, in his studio.

After playing rock ‘n’ roll in clubs, he worked his way up in the jazz world as a sideman to artists like Larry Coryell, Bobby McFerrin and Eddie Gomez.

He then stumbled into becoming a leading documentary composer when his first work, “A Cuban Odyssey” — for Westport husband-and-wife directors Jim Burroughs and Suzanne Bauman — was nominated for an Academy Award in 1982. (This was before there was such a profession as “documentary composer”).

Documentaries have been a viable business only since cable TV came of age in the early 1980s. 

Keane scored the chimps movie for Jane Goodall, a popular soundtrack about the Ottoman Empire for Bauman, and other notable projects. 

Keane began working for Ric Burns just after he produced the most consequential documentary series in television history, “ The Civil War,” with his older brother Ken in 1990.

Keane and Ric Burns collaborated on classic documentaries like “New York,” “The Donner Party,” “Andy Warhol” and more. 

Brian Keane (right) and Ric Burns, at work on “Oliver Sacks.”

“Dante” is their latest effort.

Keane also had some hit records and soundtracks in the late 1980s and ’90s. He was an in-demand record producer, winning a Grammy and emerging as “the John Williams of the documentary” (Hollywood Reporter).

After signing a big recording deal as a jazz artist with Capitol Blue Note records, he scored the first prime time documentary series on television. “ABC Turning Point” drew 30 million viewers a night.

“People thought that was nuts to try to get dropped by Blue Note after having a very successful debut record. But I had to get them to drop me, or I would have been condemned to be Earl Klugh II for the rest of my career.”

He began to “over-invest” in the quality of his scores. “Well-made documentaries ‘document’ history. They’re there for the long-term,” Keane says.

He morphed into sports history for a multi-Emmy-winning run at HBO and ESPN. That came in handy when Napster put record stores out of business.

As the television industry went “cheap and digital, and started  hiring kids with computers in their mom’s basements for 10% of the price,” Keane retired for a few years.

He went back to work for Barry Levinson in 2012 on a BBC series, “Copper.”

When that ended he took all that quality music he’d written (and owned), set it up with metadata and a computer search system, and has non-exclusively blanket leased it to major entertainment companies ever since.

The problem, he says, is that “in streaming, which doesn’t pay artists anything anyway, the AI robots look at my most popular records as an artist. I ended my career as an artist in 1993.

“My most popular records are Middle Eastern jazz fusion I made in the late ’80s. They have 15 or 16 million hits.

“So the profit-seeking AI robots put me on Radio Baghdad streaming, and ignore my many soundtrack albums.”

Keane decided that being restricted artistically and financially by a fan base was “not a great plan.” While he produced many hit records, the AI robots of streaming recognize only the song and the artist.

So, he says, “I’m relegated to being a Middle Eastern artist who is really a rock and jazz guitarist, who happens to write symphonies and is known as a world music producer, who now is promoting a high art movie soundtrack from medieval Italy. No wonder the robots are confused.”

(One track of “Dante” will be released Friday, March 22. The entire double album will be released March 29.)

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