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.

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.