Frisner Augustin

Dancers and choreographers who had played with companies in Port-au-Prince since the 1940s were leaving Haiti during the 1960s and '70s and re-forming in New York.

Frisner Augustin (March 1, 1948 – February 28, 2012) was a major performer and composer of Haitian Vodou drumming, and the first and only citizen of Haiti to win a National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in the United States, where he resided for forty years.

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 also recorded for the late filmmaker Jonathan Demme.

Augustin was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on March 1, 1948.

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.

The child's father, a carpenter named Julien Augustin, left their home not long after the birth of his second child, a girl.

Growing up without the presence of a father in the home, the boy decided it was up to him to support his mother and sister.

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.

He earned the nickname Ti Kelep (Tee Kay-lep), which means "Little Kelep", the second word referring to a pattern unique to the third drum of the Vodou ensemble.

By the time Augustin had reached his early teens, the Vodou houses of his community had recognized his genius for drumming, and one house initiated him as its ountògi (oo-taw-gee; sacred drummer).

Julien Augustin returned to the family and placed his now adolescent son in a welding school at about the same time that André Germain, a director of Haiti's La Troupe Folklorique Nationale (National Dance Troupe), discovered him playing at a Vodou ceremony just outside Port-au-Prince.

To his father's consternation, Augustin dropped out of the welding school when Germain introduced him to Lina Mathon Blanchet, a classical pianist who had organized Haiti Chante et Danse (Haiti Sings and Dances), one of the country's first companies performing folklore, a word used in Haiti to denote both traditional culture and a genre that represents traditional culture on the modern stage.

Blanchet also taught piano and guided the career of Jacky Duroseau, who went on to develop a unique style of Vodou jazz.

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.

While continuing to play in Vodou temples and in a Mardi Gras band of his own creation, he entertained tourists in theaters and hotels, inside and outside Haiti.

Augustin found work drumming for Jean-Léon Destiné, Louinès Louinis, Troupe Shango of Arnold Elie, and the Ibo Dancers of Paulette St. Lot; however, throughout the 1970s, he aspired to leadership of his own group even though dancers typically led folklore companies.

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

Like all other members of the company, he used the opportunity to emigrate from Haiti and settle in the burgeoning Haitian diaspora of New York City.

Soon after his emigration to New York City in 1972, Augustin re-connected with childhood friend Oungan Emmanuel Cadet, who had established a Vodou society in the Bronx.

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

Such a marriage, according to Vodou practitioners, brings prosperity to the human partner in exchange for special devotion.

Augustin would also go on to a real-life marriage with one of Cadet's initiates, who helped him secure his permanent residency in the United States in 1977.

As he became Cadet's lead drummer, word of mouth helped him to find work in other Vodou societies taking root throughout New York City.

Augustin carried this mission forward from the 1980s on, both in and in, , and.

Augustin led his own ensemble, La Troupe Makandal, from 1981 until his death.

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.

In 1981 La Troupe Makandal, a company established in the Port-au-Prince neighborhood of Upper Belair and named after the eighteenth-century revolutionary and messiah François Makandal, arrived in New York and sought Augustin out for help in establishing itself in the diaspora.

He took the group under his wing and introduced it to the Haitian community in a Thanksgiving festival at Brooklyn College.

The company immediately and thereafter distinguished itself for its raw authenticity and bold presentation of the sacred gesture.

Together with his drumming student, musicologist Lois Wilcken, Augustin established the company as a not-for-profit organization incorporated in New York State.

Directing his own company gave Augustin the opportunity to develop a singularly powerful style of Vodou drumming and to train an ensemble in his own manner.

He and the company soon attracted the attention of entrepreneurs, particularly with staged representations of Vodou rites that balanced the mystical with a mission to re-educate the public about Vodou and Haiti itself.

He took Makandal across the United States and abroad; venues included Lincoln Center, the American Museum of Natural History, New York's Town Hall, the Festival International de Louisiane, the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, the 1995 Bouyon Rasin Festival in Port-au-Prince, Banlieues Bleues in France, and the Tokyo Summer Festival.

Throughout his performing and teaching career, he continued to drum for Vodou houses both in and out of New York.

In his own analysis, he placed greatest value on drumming directly for the spirits in a consecrated space.

Recognition arrived in 1998 when the cultural center City Lore inducted Augustin into its People's Hall of Fame.

Filmmaker Jonathan Demme, whose film Beloved included Makandal on its soundtrack, presented the award and dubbed Augustin "the Arnold Schwarzenegger of transcendental music".