Eric Du'Sean Harland was born November 8, 1976, in Houston, Texas, and grew up in the city's Pleasantville neighborhood. His mother started him on piano, but the drums took hold early — he was studying orchestral percussion and idolizing Elvin Jones well before his teens were over. At Houston's High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, he won first chair with the Regional and All-State Texas Jazz Band in 1992-93 and, in 1994, received a special Citation for Outstanding Musicianship from the International Association of Jazz Educators. Wynton Marsalis, running a masterclass at the school during Harland's senior year, singled him out and encouraged him to study in New York; Marsalis's recommendation helped land Harland a full scholarship to the Manhattan School of Music.

Harland had already begun his professional career in 1993, playing locally while he finished high school, and the momentum only built once he reached New York. Over the following decade he became one of the most called-upon drummers of his generation. Early studio credits include the piano-bass-drums trio session The Process (2002, Criss Cross) with Edward Simon and John Patitucci, and McCoy Tyner's Land of Giants (2003, Telarc) — a Grammy-nominated quartet date with vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson and bassist Charnett Moffett. By 2005 he had joined saxophonist Charles Lloyd's band, appearing on Jumping the Creek (ECM) alongside pianist Geri Allen. The Lloyd relationship deepened into the Charles Lloyd New Quartet — with pianist Jason Moran and bassist Reuben Rogers — across a run of acclaimed albums: Sangam (2006, a trio session with tabla master Zakir Hussain), Rabo de Nube (2008), Mirror (2010), and Passin' Thru (2017, Blue Note). Lloyd brought Harland back for Sangam & Friends (2026, Blue Note), an expanded revisiting of the original trio.

Harland's other major-band affiliations span a cross-section of contemporary jazz. Bassist Dave Holland recruited him for Prism (2013, Okeh/Dare2 Records), an amplified quartet with guitarist Kevin Eubanks and pianist Craig Taborn assembled to mark the 40th anniversary of Holland's debut as a leader; the two later co-founded the all-star cooperative quartet Aziza with saxophonist Chris Potter and guitarist Lionel Loueke, whose self-titled 2016 album (Dare2 Records) is one of the more acclaimed cooperative dates of its decade. Harland was also a member of the SFJAZZ Collective from 2005 to 2012, and has worked extensively with Terence Blanchard — including Blanchard's Grammy-winning A Tale of God's Will (A Requiem for Katrina) — as well as Joshua Redman, Kurt Rosenwinkel, and Chris Potter, whose own career is covered in full in his JazzProfiles.com profile.

In 2009, Harland co-founded the cooperative quartet James Farm with Redman, pianist Aaron Parks, and bassist Matt Penman, debuting at that year's Montreal Jazz Festival. The band released two albums on Nonesuch — its self-titled debut (2011) and City Folk (2014) — blending composed post-bop with rock, ambient, and electronica textures. Harland's connection to Parks, whose own career is covered in full in his JazzProfiles.com profile, predates James Farm: Harland played drums on Parks's 2008 Blue Note leader debut, Invisible Cinema. The two have continued working together since James Farm's run ended, releasing the self-released trio sessions Volume One and Volume Two (2022) with bassist Matt Brewer.

As a leader, Harland fronts Voyager, a working quintet that grew out of a 2008 residency in Paris and became the vehicle for his own writing: saxophonist Walter Smith III, guitarist Julian Lage, pianist Taylor Eigsti, and bassist Harish Raghavan anchored the band's core sound from its live debut, Voyager: Live by Night (Space Time Records, recorded at Paris's Sunside club and the Jazz-en-Tête festival in Clermont-Ferrand, first issued in France in 2010 and released more widely in 2011). Guitarist Nir Felder joined the lineup for Vipassana (2014) and 13th Floor (2018), both released on GSI Records — the New York studio Harland co-founded in 2017 with Daniel Rovin and Austin White. In 2019 he released the more electronics-inflected solo statement Supa Nova on Newvelle Records, and in June 2026 he returned with Vipassana II (Ropeadope), fronting a largely reconfigured lineup featuring keyboardist BIGYUKI, percussionist Keita Ogawa, saxophonist Ben Wendel, guitarist Gilad Hekselman, and returning bassist Raghavan.

Across a career now spanning three decades, Harland has appeared on several hundred recordings as a sideman — outlets covering him place the figure anywhere from roughly 100 to 500 depending on how appearances are counted — while continuing to lead Voyager and record with longtime collaborators old and new.

Harland's playing is built on two poles that rarely coexist so comfortably in one drummer: the harmonic sophistication and polyrhythmic freedom he absorbed studying orchestral percussion and idolizing Elvin Jones, and a deep pocket rooted in gospel and groove that lets him serve pop-adjacent textures without losing jazz's elasticity. That range is why bandleaders as different as the tabla-inflected spirituality of Charles Lloyd's Sangam trio, Dave Holland's amplified, guitar-forward Prism, and the composed, rock-tinged cooperative writing of James Farm have all built music around him. As a leader with Voyager, that same range shows up as restlessness: each album shifts the band's chemistry, from the live acoustic quintet of Live by Night to Vipassana II's electronics-heavy, largely rebuilt lineup, without losing the compositional throughline of Harland's own writing.