23 Facts About Clifford Thornton

Clifford Edward Thornton III was an American jazz trumpeter, trombonist, political activist, and educator.

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

Clifford Thornton briefly attended Morgan State University and Temple University.

Clifford Thornton 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.

Clifford Thornton was included in the dialogue around the developing thought of political artists, including Shepp, Askia M Toure, and Nathan Hare, as well as the journals Freedomways and Umbra.

Clifford Thornton 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.

Clifford Thornton was invited with Shepp to perform in Algiers for the 1969 Pan-African Cultural Festival of the Organization of African Unity.

At this early European pop and jazz festival Clifford Thornton got to hear and work with a number of young free-jazz artists from Chicago.

Clifford Thornton 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.

Clifford Thornton established political and intellectual connections to avant-garde artists and musicians, including Frederic Rzewski, Philip Glass, and Richard Teitelbaum.

Clifford Thornton was hired in 1969; this position gave him the security to travel to Africa and France.

Clifford Thornton's 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.

Clifford Thornton arranged performances at Wesleyan by Rashied Ali, Horace Silver, McCoy Tyner and many other jazz musicians.

Clifford Thornton began writing for the Gardens of Harlem album.

Clifford Thornton 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.

Clifford Thornton included shorter pieces by his collaborators on the albums, as well as his arrangements of traditional African pieces.

Clifford Thornton was widely perceived in the media as owning radical political leanings and connections with leading figures of the Black Panther Party; he is supposed to have met Bobby Seale and Eldridge Cleaver during the Pan-African Cultural Festival in 1969, and claims have been made that he was a BPP Minister for Art.

Clifford Thornton was denied entry into France in 1970, reportedly 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.

In 1976, Clifford Thornton accepted a position with UNESCO's International Bureau of Education to be an educational counselor on African-American education; he spent the remainder of his life in Geneva, Switzerland.

Clifford Thornton remained active musically; he led a performance in 1977 at Willisau, Lucerne, Switzerland, did two recordings in Austria with Anthony Braxton in 1977 and 1978, and was featured on a 1980 record with a group led by former Dollar Brand reedman and South African exile Joe Malinga.

Younger musicians affected by Clifford Thornton's musical thought include Fred Ho, Hajj Daoud Haroon, George Starks, Ras Moshe Burnett, Peter Zummo, and Marie Incontrera.

Clifford Thornton can be heard on only a small number of recordings that are now difficult to find.

Still, thirty years after his demise, Clifford Thornton's work remains highly regarded by critics such as Thurston Moore, author Philippe Carles, and Jazz.