Santi Wilson Debriano was born June 27, 1955, in Panama City, Panama, and moved with his family to Brooklyn, New York, at age four. His father was known as a song composer in Panama. Debriano started playing jazz instruments as a teenager at Franklin K. Lane High School, then studied composition and politics at Union College in Schenectady, New York, from 1972 to 1976, before continuing at the New England Conservatory of Music and earning a graduate degree in ethnomusicology at Wesleyan University.

He began performing professionally in 1981, working through the late 1970s and early 1980s with Archie Shepp, including Shepp's 1981 and 1982 recordings I Know About the Life and Soul Song. He then moved to Paris, where he spent about three years playing with tenor saxophonist Sam Rivers before returning to New York City. The two men later shared a studio credit as well: on the 1992 various-leaders session Salutes the Saxophone by the group Roots, released on In+Out Records, Rivers, Arthur Blythe, Nathan Davis and Chico Freeman traded tenor and alto lines over a rhythm section of Debriano, pianist Don Pullen, and drummer Tommy Campbell, with all players appearing on the full album rather than isolated tracks.

Debriano made his recording debut as a leader in 1987 with Obeah, cut at Rudy Van Gelder's studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, on June 4 and 5 of that year and released on the French label Free Lance. The session paired him with pianist Kenny Barron, drummer Billy Hart, saxophonist Sonny Fortune, trumpeter/percussionist Jerry Gonzalez, and guitarist Paul Meyers, with Debriano composing or co-composing most of the material and producing the date himself. He followed it with two more Free Lance albums, Soldiers of Fortune (1990, with pianist Kenny Werner and vibraphonist Joe Locke) and Trio + Two (1991, co-billed to Debriano, drummer Cindy Blackman and guitarist David Fiuczynski, with Greg Osby and Jerry Gonzalez guesting), then a co-billed session with Billy Hart and Arthur Blythe, 3-Ology (1993, Konnex Records), and Panamaniacs (1994, Free Lance), a quartet date crediting "The Santi Debriano Group" with pianist David Kikoski, saxophonist David Sánchez, and percussionist Mino Cinelu that drew explicitly on his Panamanian roots.

His deepening tie to pianist Don Pullen continued through the 1990s. Debriano played bass throughout Pullen's 1995 Blue Note album Sacred Common Ground, a project realized in collaboration with choreographer Garth Fagan as a dance piece exploring Native American themes, and appeared on the 1997 compilation The Best of Don Pullen: The Blue Note Years. He led two more albums under his own name before the decade closed: Circlechant (1999, HighNote Records), a world-music-inflected date with pianist Helio Alves, drummer Horacio "El Negro" Hernández, violinist Miri Ben-Ari and percussionist/vocalist Valtinho Anastácio, and Artistic License (2001, Savant), again engineered by Van Gelder, with Alves, Ben-Ari, drummer Will Calhoun and saxophonist Abraham Burton.

In the 2000s, Debriano developed a parallel Latin-jazz strand alongside guitarist Roni Ben-Hur, whom he first recorded with as a sideman on Ben-Hur's 2007 Motéma album Keepin' It Open (bass throughout, alongside drummer Lewis Nash and trumpeter Jeremy Pelt). Ben-Hur and Debriano had also been running the summer jazz camp Festi-Jazz together since 2011 in the village of Saint-Cézaire-sur-Siagne in the south of France, where their annual duo concert became the event's centerpiece. That collaboration was documented on record as Our Thing (2012, Motéma), a genuine three-way co-billing to Ben-Hur, Debriano and Brazilian drummer Duduka Da Fonseca rather than a leader date with a sideman credit, recorded to capture what producer Timothy L. Porter called "the long time collaboration of Roni Ben-Hur and Santi Debriano." The same trio reconvened under the band name Our Thing for Manhattan Style (2016, Jazzheads), again billed to all three players equally. Separately, in 2004, Debriano recorded two co-billed duo and trio dates exploring his own compositional interests: When Baden Meets Trane with pianist Glauco Sagebin and drummer Paulinho Braga, and Spirit and Samba, a duo record with guitarist Paul Meyers on Mapleshade Records.

Debriano's most recent work has returned to the Afro-Caribbean and spiritual themes that run through his catalog. Flash of the Spirit (2021, Truth Revolution Recording Collective), named for Robert Farris Thompson's book on African and Afro-Atlantic art, features saxophonist Justin Robinson, flutist Andrea Brachfeld and pianist Bill O'Connell, and includes a piano-less version of Kenny Barron's composition "Voyage," a nod to the pianist who had appeared on his own recording debut more than three decades earlier. Ashanti (2022, JoJo Records), credited to Santi Debriano & Arkestra Bembé, followed with a larger horn-driven band including pianist Mamiko Watanabe and drummer Robby Ameen, and was featured on WBGO's New Day, New Play series in March 2023. In recent years he has also performed and recorded on guitar with an organ group fronted by vocalist Nina Shanka. Alongside his playing career, Debriano served as music director for the arts at Dwight Morrow High School in Englewood, New Jersey, received a jazz education award from New York University in 2001, and has given seminars and masterclasses at Wesleyan University, the New School for Jazz, NYU, the University of Panama and the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. He adopted the first name "Asante," Swahili for "gratitude," under the guidance of drummer Billy Hart, and now records under the name Asante Santi Debriano. He lives in Staten Island, New York, where his home was destroyed by Hurricane Sandy in 2012 and later rebuilt.

Debriano's catalog runs through two distinct but overlapping New York jazz worlds. His formative years put him inside the avant-garde/free-jazz circle around Archie Shepp, Sam Rivers, Don Pullen, David Murray, Oliver Lake and Cecil Taylor, where his playing favors an open, exploratory approach built for collective improvisation rather than fixed changes. At the same time, sessions like Obeah and 3-Ology put him in the company of hard-bop and mainstream players such as Kenny Barron, Billy Hart and Arthur Blythe, and his own leader dates from Panamaniacs onward increasingly foreground the Afro-Caribbean and Panamanian rhythmic vocabulary of his upbringing, a thread that runs through Circlechant, Artistic License, and culminates in Ashanti's explicitly Afro-diasporic focus with Arkestra Bembé. His long-running duo partnership and jazz-camp collaboration with guitarist Roni Ben-Hur, documented on Our Thing and Manhattan Style, adds a third, more song-based Brazilian-inflected dimension to a catalog that otherwise splits between free improvisation and Afro-Latin rhythm.