Who Is Deborah Eckman? Singer, Songwriter, Actress, and Artist Explained

Deborah Eckman is a singer, songwriter, actress, and visual artist whose music fuses her original jazz/pop background with East Indian Classical Vocal training. According to her website, she trained originally as an actress and singer, has been writing and recording her own songs for roughly 25 years, and began studying East Indian Classical Vocal in 1998 — first at the Late P K Salve Academy of Fine Arts & Music in Nagpur, India, and more recently with Shweta Jhaveri in Berkeley, CA. If you want to understand her work before listening or browsing, the short answer is: expect contemporary songs built from jazz, pop, folk, and Indian rhythms and phrasing, alongside acting credits and encaustic wax artwork.

Musical background and training

Her site describes a path that started in acting and singing, then widened into songwriting and recording. She says she regularly performed at songwriter showcases around London, as well as in Los Angeles and San Francisco, CA, and Vancouver, BC — places where she has spent time.

The turning point in her musical identity is the 1998 start of East Indian Classical Vocal study. That training is what she credits for her current approach: fusing her original jazz/pop background with Indian rhythms and phrasing.

What her music sounds like

Her own description and the reviews quoted on her site point to a hybrid rather than a single genre:

• Contemporary songs drawing on Indian rhythms, folk, and jazz guitar
• Vocals described as powerful and haunting, moving between East and West
• Harmonies layered with atmospheric soundscapes, with folk, pop-rock, jazz, and flamenco resonances
• Instrumentation on the “3000 Days” CD includes Vivian Xia’s yanqin and Ji Rong Huang’s Chinese erhu, with Eckman’s vocals weaving alongside them

Up all Night Music, quoted on her site, summarizes it as “a rich tapestry of sounds including Indian rhythms, folk and jazz guitar in her contemporary songs.”

Acting, songwriting, and visual art together

Eckman presents herself under several labels at once — singer/songwriter, actor, and artist — and addresses the apparent confusion directly. She quotes actor Hugh Laurie’s argument that the usual rule (“actors are supposed to act, and musicians are supposed to music”) has no real answer behind it, and uses that to explain why she doesn’t separate her practices.

On the visual side, her site lists D E Designs/Artwork and identifies her work in encaustic wax among her keywords. So the site functions as a single home for music, stage and screen work, a record label (Dragon Elm Records), and artwork.

Where to find her work

Her website is organized into pages that map onto these areas:

If you want a quick sense of whether her music fits your taste, start with the Music page and the reviews she quotes, then move to Stage & Screen and D E Designs/Artwork for the other sides of her practice.