• Courtesy
• Dennis Warren in his home studio

Dennis Warren wanted to be a voracious student of the drums. Born in Boston, he didn't start playing until his early twenties, but he pursued the discipline with full conviction, letting his instincts and idiosyncrasies as an improviser lead him. He was nearly 30 when he enrolled in the Black Music Division at Bennington College.

"I wanted to be a monster, and I wanted to have super chops," he said. "I wanted to be undeniable."

In other words, he was ready to receive the prismatic teachings of free jazz percussionist Milford Graves, whom generations of Bennington students knew as "Professor." Graves, who died in 2021, promised to show Warren "10 things that will give you access to a hundred things," he recalled.

More than four decades later, Warren, 70, is still possessed by the exponential possibilities of improvised music, he said, "because I don't know the endgame of my sound."

Warren has explored those possibilities most consistently through his long-running Full Metal Revolutionary Jazz Ensemble, an obscure, fearless group that was stacked with jazz talent during its most active period in the 1990s. Since then, he has continued to hold regular jam sessions for the band in his home studio in Springfield, Mass. He's broadcast or uploaded hundreds of those sessions online.

"It's truly some of the most thoughtful and hard-hitting music," said Jami Fischer, a recent University of Vermont graduate and free jazz enthusiast who is helping Warren organize his extensive archive. "When you hear him play the drums — he always says this — it's a life-or-death thing."

Renamed the Full Metal Revolutionary Jazz Eclectic, Warren's band returns to Burlington this Saturday, June 10, for the first time in more than 20 years. Warren and longtime collaborator, percussionist and Worcester resident Martin Gil are staging a marathon of kaleidoscopic group improvisation at the Off Center for the Dramatic Arts, where Gil is a board member. They'll be joined by Earl Grant Lawrence on flute, Vance Provey on trumpet, guitarist Tor Yochai Snyder, keyboardist Michael Shea, and bassists John Turner and Mowgli Giannitti.

The show includes six audacious sets over 10 hours, featuring the full octet and spontaneously permuted combos, all backed by a montage-style video called "From Black Holes to Earth's Diaspora," which Warren produced and plans to project behind the band. A $20 ticket grants access to any set or the whole shebang — for those who share the band's endurance.

The show's name, the Undiscovered Jazz Festival, is a barbed play on the corporate-sponsored event taking place in the city at the same time. Suffice it to say this show isn't affiliated with the Burlington Discover Jazz Festival, which tends to feature commercially successful artists and rising stars.

"Over here, it's a little different," Gil said.

Warren started playing music in the early '70s as a student at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, which he attended through a program intended to diversify the liberal college's white, middle-class student body. He took a percussion class from free jazz pioneer Andrew Cyrille and later played congas on the picket line during a bitter student strike in 1973 over budget cuts that threatened his financial aid.

Warren dropped out and bought his first conga by pawning a cassette deck he'd extracted from a broken-down car. He practiced in public parks around Boston until Gil, a fellow student at Antioch whose father started Bennington Potters, told him about the new Black Music Division at Bennington College. Warren sat in on a Graves class on Asian and African influences in Western music and was mesmerized.

"I couldn't fucking believe it," Warren recalled. "I said, 'Man, this motherfucker's got all the fucking answers.'"

The Bennington program, headed by trumpeter Bill Dixon, was a pocket of avant-garde energy "still unabsorbed by the bourgeoisie, for it is too raw, savage, unnerving," as Bennington College English professor Camille Paglia described it in 1976. Graves was an intense, complex drummer who wrote software to analyze human heartbeats. He distilled the jazz concept of swing to its propulsive essence: "Swing means, man, when you can feel, man, like, 'Hey, man, I want to live to the next day,'" he said in a 2018 documentary about his life, Milford Graves Full Mantis.

After graduating from Bennington, Warren formed Full Metal in 1987, when he was in his late thirties. A reference to the military-grade, fully jacketed bullets that can pierce clean through a human target, the name was a somewhat abstract metaphor for Warren's musical project: He wanted his band to work within the entire spectrum of sound while simultaneously "piercing through" it, he said.

• Courtesy
• Full Metal Revolutionary Jazz Eclectic in bandleader Dennis Warren's studio

Full Metal's oft-shifting lineup included some of the most talented experimentalists anywhere, including tenor saxophonist Glenn Spearman and trumpeter Raphe Malik — both veterans of the Cecil Taylor Unit — and Marco Eneidi, a ferocious alto saxophonist who cut his teeth in remnants of the New York City loft scene. The band self-released several cassettes in the early '90s and played in clubs around New England, including Burlington's Club Toast and Café NoNo.

The band's sound was hard to describe because it was so unpredictable. In Concert, a 1992 release that was recorded live at Club Metronome in Burlington, featured 11 performers and scat singing by Poland-born vocalist Teresa Sienkiewicz. The hourlong collective improvisation rumbles through eras and styles, unstuck from time or vibe.

Playing free jazz in New England in the '90s was a bit like screaming in the wilderness. Warren and his band didn't care. When he finished college, Warren made what he considers the pivotal decision in his musical life: He got a full-time job working with disabled adults and resolved to pursue drumming religiously in his personal time. The bargain ensured that his music would remain in the margins while freeing it from commercial pressure.

Full Metal exemplifies how "some of the most amazing and creative improvised music was taking place in our own backyard," Fischer said, though that music remains underappreciated locally and within the wider history of jazz.

Fischer learned of Warren's work while researching some of Full Metal's better-known collaborators and contacted Warren, who offered access to his extensive personal archive. Fischer traveled to Warren's Springfield home between UVM classes and began wading through the trove. Out of those meetings came an ongoing project to digitize and catalog Warren's recordings.

One of the tapes Fischer reviewed captured a 1994 trio show in Cambridge, Mass., at the club Western Front, where Warren played weekly. It featured Warren on drums, Raqib Hassan on reeds and Larry Roland on bass.

"When I popped it in the tape player and heard it for the first time, it was absolutely mind-blowing," Fischer said. "I could not believe that I was hearing this music." The recording, under the name Raqib Hassan Trio, will be the inaugural release later this year for a small tape label Fischer is launching called Kalmia Sound.

Full Metal's most recent release, last year's Improvisations for Democracy, was recorded in Warren's home studio in response to the U.S. Capitol riot. Each of the six long cuts is accompanied by a Warren-produced video that superimposes Donald Trump lackeys and insurrectionists over the performers. The videos are hokey and stir-crazy; the music is restless and defiant.

Recordings of this weekend's Undiscovered Jazz Fest seem poised for future release, as well. Warren is bringing more than a dozen cameras to capture the performances from every vantage point. "This is really a self-produced aesthetic adventure," he said.

Warren's practice of painstakingly recording his band's music and listening to it is part of his process of constant discovery. He theorizes his musical practice in relation to quantum physics, which he outlines in densely detailed slide decks on Full Metal's website. Music has a long history as a tool of control by the powerful, whether they be monarchs, religious leaders or modern corporations. Warren's on a different sort of trip.

"From my perspective, man, I'm just tapping into this fucking internal vibration of the biochemical spirit of the human species, i.e., Dennis Warren, at this point in time and space," he said, "maximizing his absolute innate power by doing it on the drum set."