A youth prodigy on the traditional drums of Haitian Vodou in ritual context, Augustin took his genre to the modern stage, often exploring its common roots with various jazz styles.

From his initial forays in Haiti with Lina Mathon-Blanchet, Jacky Duroseau, and Jazz des Jeunes, he went on to work in the United States and Europe with Kip Hanrahan, Edy Brisseaux, and Andrew Cyrille.

He used the group not only to make music but also to change popular misconceptions in the public mind regarding Haitian Vodou, a poorly understood but richly developed Afro-Haitian spiritual discipline.

[1][2] His mother, a poor retailer named Andrea Laguerre, gave birth to Frisner, her first child, under a tree outside the city's General Hospital while waiting for a room that never became available.

Andrea took her son to the dirt-floor shack that was their home in the capital's Portail Léogane district, specifically, a community called "behind the cemetery" because of its location along the west side of the major burial ground at the south end of the city.

[4] Since the family had no means to put him in school, and since his passion was music, he began to follow in the footsteps of his uncle Catelus Laguerre, a drummer in the oral tradition, at the age of seven.

[7] Augustin soon found work with a small jazz combo featuring Duroseau, with Haiti Chante et Danse, and later with the folklore companies of African-American dancer Lavinia Williams and Haitian dance professor and choreographer Viviane Gauthier.

In 1972, one year into the tenure of dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier, Augustin accepted an engagement in New York with Jazz des Jeunes,[4] the orchestra that accompanied La Troupe Folklorique Nationale.

In October 1973 Cadet performed a spiritual marriage between Augustin and Èzili Freda Dawomen,[13] a Vodou spirit with roots in West Africa who represents romantic love.

[17] Augustin found work drumming for Jean-Léon Destiné, Louinès Louinis, Troupe Shango of Arnold Elie, and the Ibo Dancers of Paulette St.

The night before the funeral a local mambo conducted the traditional Vodou desounen,[39] rites that formally separate the spirit of the dead from the body and send it beneath the cosmic waters.

[43] One year and one day later, as per tradition, a Vodou priest near Jacmel, a city in the south of Haiti and the source of Augustin's maternal line,[4] reclaimed his soul and installed it in a place of honor.

[44] In June 2012 Makandal, together with Ayiti Fasafas, the Center for Traditional Music and Dance, and the Haiti Cultural Exchange, presented a memorial performance to Augustin in Brooklyn, New York.

[50] Drummers draw from a wide palette of tone to articulate points on and between the beats;[51][52] the strokes render a sense of off-beat phrasing, or the interplay of duple and triple time.

[55] Apart from the kase, the drumming seemingly consists of repeated ensemble patterns, but a discerning ear will note that the cycles vary according to song phrasing and ritual action.

Critic Robert Palmer noted after a performance in Manhattan, "...Augustin embroidered explosive improvisations...over the ensemble's deftly layered rhythmic conversations while always keeping an eye on dancers and singers and guiding the ebb and flow of relaxation and intensity".