Clifford was born in
Philadelphia. The year of his birth has been reported as early as 1934 or as late as 1939. Jazz pianist Jimmy Golden was his uncle, while his cousin, drummer
J. C. Moses, had a jazz career that was cut short by failing health. Clifford began piano lessons when he was seven-years-old. He briefly attended
Morgan State University and
Temple University. Several biographers report that Clifford studied with trumpeter
Donald Byrd during 1957, after Byrd had left
Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, and also that he worked with 17-year-old tuba player
Ray Draper and
Webster Young. Following a late 1950s stint in the U.S. Army bands Thornton moved to New York City. Clifford's political and musical motivations are epitomized by his statement: "For a lot of brothers like myself, we got no choice. What else can we do in this world that's not a slave job? Really, what are our options? We have to be creative musicians if we want to be somebody in this world." In the early 1960s, Clifford lived in the Williamsburg area of Brooklyn in an apartment building with other young musicians, including
Rashied Ali,
Marion Brown, and
Don Cherry. He performed with numerous avant-garde jazz bands, appearing as a sideman on records by notable artists
Sun Ra,
Archie Shepp,
Pharoah Sanders, and
Sam Rivers; many of whom were affected by the compositional ideas of
Cecil Taylor. In the January 1976
Black World/Negro Digest, Ron Welburne states that during this period Clifford had been active in the
Black Arts Movement, associated with
Amiri Baraka and
Jayne Cortez. This musical and artistic network provided him with a variety of perspectives on ideas such as black self-determination, performance forms,
outside playing, and textural rhythm; it also gave him access to performers who would provide the abilities some of his later compositions required. He was included in the dialogue around the developing thought of political artists, including Shepp,
Askia M. Touré, and
Nathan Hare, as well as the journals
Freedomways and
Umbra.
Early albums Thornton's interest in composition eventually became the focus of his musical career. He had worked with
Marzette Watts on the latter's first recording sessions; Watts credited Clifford's organizational skills and management of the group dynamics with the success of the sessions in achieving their goals. Thornton's first album,
Freedom & Unity (1967), was recorded the day after
John Coltrane's funeral. It also included Edward and Harold "Nunding" Avent, a black activist who a year later was suspected of being an informant and provocateur for the FBI. Of the ten songs, only the twenty-second-long "Kevin" is credited to Thornton. Archie Shepp and
Ornette Coleman both wrote liner notes for the album. In the
AllMusic review, Rob Ferrier says: "As Albert Ayler and Archie Shepp hearkened back to field hollers and very basic folk forms, musicians like Clifford Thornton went in the opposite direction, building on the music of the sophisticates and expanding the possibilities for jazz." Thornton was invited with Shepp to perform in
Algiers for the 1969 Pan-African Cultural Festival of the
Organization of African Unity. This visit had an important impact on his developing political thought, and he claimed that it helped to integrate his musical and political aims. The next month he was in Paris, and over an eleven-day period at
BYG Actuel he recorded five albums, including
Ketchaoua, his second album as leader and first with his own compositions. In October a Thornton-led group performed at the
Actuel Festival in Amougies, Belgium. At this early European pop and jazz festival (which claimed
Woodstock as an inspiration and included performances by
Pink Floyd,
MEV, and a
Frank Zappa/Archie Shepp jam-session) Clifford got to hear and work with a number of young free-jazz artists from Chicago. In November he was back in Paris as a sideman on Archie Shepp's albums
Black Gypsy and
Pitchin Can. He continued to work in France through the next year, recording in July 1970 with Shepp, and completing his own album
The Panther and the Lash in early November. During this two-year period, Thornton worked with many European free jazz musicians, as well as growing his network of contacts to embrace Americans who had not been in the early-'60s New York scene, such as Chicago musicians
Joseph Jarman,
Malachi Favors, and
Anthony Braxton). Thornton also established political and intellectual connections to
avant-garde artists and musicians, including
Frederic Rzewski,
Philip Glass, and
Richard Teitelbaum. During that period he also commenced a relationship with Cristine Jakob.
Teaching In 1968, music instructor
Ken McIntyre recommended Thornton as a candidate for assistant professor in
world music at
Wesleyan University. He was hired in 1969; this position gave him the security to travel to Africa and France. His tenure ran through 1975; during that period he brought many of his network of jazz musicians as Artists-in-Residence on campus, giving the academic world-music community more exposure to current American music. Among those artists were
Sam Rivers,
Jimmy Garrison,
Ed Blackwell, and
Marion Brown. He arranged performances at Wesleyan by Rashied Ali,
Horace Silver,
McCoy Tyner and many other jazz musicians. In addition, he included other artists from the world music program on his recordings, such as
Milton Cardona,
Abraham Kobena Adzenyah,
Pandit Laxmi Ganesh Tewari, and
Lakshminarayana Shankar), and introduced them to his fellow African-American performers. While at Wesleyan, he recorded the 1972 pastiché album
Communications Network (side one with
Sirone and Shankar, side two backing Jayne Cortez, and both engineered by Marzette Watts). He also began writing for the
Gardens of Harlem album.
Composing Thornton's earliest recordings as a composer and arranger are found on
Marzette Watts's
eponymous 1966 record. He used as many as eight performers on the ten recordings, and their length runs from the eight-minute "Pan-African Festival" to the twenty-five-minute "Festivals and Funerals" on the album
Communications Network (1972). He included shorter pieces by his collaborators on the albums, as well as his arrangements of traditional African pieces.
The Gardens of Harlem (1974) was developed as a project of the
Jazz Composer's Orchestra during 1972–1974, and was revised twice before the twenty-five-person recording was done in April 1974. for a speech he made either at that year's
Juan-les-Pins Jazz Festival or at Mutualite Hall in Paris; the ban was lifted in 1971. Because of this interruption, Thornton was unable to continue performing and recording in Paris. In 1976, Clifford accepted a position with
UNESCO's International Bureau of Education to be an educational counselor on African-American education; and was featured on a 1980 record with a group led by former
Dollar Brand reedman and South African exile Joe Malinga. Several of Thornton's musician contemporaries claim his music influenced them. The most notable are likely
Joe McPhee (who owns Thornton's valve trombone),
Marzette Watts, and
Bill Cole. Younger musicians affected by Clifford's musical thought include
Fred Ho, Hajj Daoud Haroon, George Starks,
Ras Moshe Burnett,
Peter Zummo, and Marie Incontrera. A number of musicians and educators also directly benefitted from being part of Thornton's network, among them
Marion Brown,
Ed Blackwell,
Rashied Ali,
Jimmy Garrison,
Sam Rivers, and
Lakshminarayana Shankar. Thornton can be heard on only a small number of recordings that are now difficult to find. Still, thirty (or perhaps thirty-five) years after his demise, Clifford's work remains highly regarded by critics such as
Thurston Moore, author
Philippe Carles, and Jazz.com's
Sean Singer. ==Discography==