"[6] 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.
[7] 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 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.
[14] 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.
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.
Thornton also established political and intellectual connections to avant-garde artists and musicians, including Frederic Rzewski, Philip Glass, and Richard Teitelbaum.
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.
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.
"[13] 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.
He was denied entry into France in 1970, reportedly[17] for a speech he made either at that year's Juan-les-Pins Jazz Festival or at Mutualite Hall in Paris;[18] the ban was lifted in 1971.
Younger musicians affected by Clifford's musical thought include Fred Ho, Hajj Daoud Haroon,[22] George Starks,[23] Ras Moshe Burnett,[24] 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.
Still, thirty (or perhaps thirty-five) years after his demise, Clifford's work remains highly regarded by critics such as Thurston Moore,[25] author Philippe Carles, and Jazz.com's Sean Singer.