Clifford Thornton

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.

Clifford Edward Thornton III (September 6, 1936 – November 25, 1989) was an American jazz trumpeter, trombonist, political activist, and educator.

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."

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.

He played free jazz and avant-garde jazz in the 1960s and '70s.

Clifford was born in Philadelphia.

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.

Thornton's earliest recordings as a composer and arranger are found on Marzette Watts's eponymous 1966 record.

Thornton's first album, Freedom & Unity (1967), was recorded the day after John Coltrane's funeral.

The ensemble included Karl Berger, Coltrane associate Jimmy Garrison, and the first recorded appearance of Joe McPhee.

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."

In 1968, music instructor Ken McIntyre recommended Thornton as a candidate for Assistant Professor in world music at Wesleyan University.

Thornton was invited with Shepp to perform in Algiers for the 1969 Pan-African Cultural Festival of the Organization for 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 was hired in 1969; this position gave him the security to travel to Africa and France.

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.

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.

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 Konbena Adzenyah, Pandit Laxmi Ganesh Tewari, and Lakshminarayana Shankar), and introduced them to his fellow African-American performers.

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.

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.