When saxophone colossus Sonny Rollins spent time in an ashram in Mumbai’s Powai in 1968

“I had no idea there were so many ashrams around Bombay!”

More than four decades after he and his friend Jehangir Dalal got into a car and drove to more than a dozen religious retreats, Nirajan Jhaveri still remembered the day in 1968 vividly.

The two men were among Bombay’s most obsessive jazz fans. As students at St Xavier’s College in the 1950s, they’d published India’s first jazz magazine, Blue Rhythm. They were so crazy about the music that they were quite willing to drive for hours to chase down the rumour that a famous American jazz musician was studying yoga somewhere in the Bombay region.

After several unsuccessful halts, the two men eventually found themselves in Powai, at the mission run by Swami Chinmayananda. That’s how they came to find the legendary saxophonist Sonny Rollins, who had taken a second break from his sky-high career to study yoga. To hear Rollins tell it, he’d come upon the ashram quite by accident.

“I had been interested in metaphysical organisations and things like Buddhism, yoga and Sufism,” he said in an interview to The Victoria Advocate in 2010. “I felt like I needed to get more into self-improvement and the greater purposes and meaning of life. I had been investigating yoga since the ’50s, so I had been primed to make this voyage. It wasn’t something I did as a whim. I had separated from my wife for a while, and the time was right to make that move.”

Having read quite a bit about yoga and various yoga masters and teachers, Rollins says that he took his horn, a bag or two and booked a flight to Bombay.

“On the last leg of the flight, I was talking to some Indian people and one fella knew something about ashrams,” he told The Victoria Advocate. “He suggested this particular place to me just outside of Bombay and this swami, Chinmayamananda.”

This is how he described a typical day at the ashram: “There were yoga students there from Europe and elsewhere and we had our meals and everything. When the swami came there were lectures. We studied the literature texts from the Vedanta. We studied the Upanishads and Yoga Sutras and all of these writings from antiquity. We weren’t doing hatha yoga so much – hatha yoga is the positions. We were mainly studying the texts, and when we didn’t have sessions, we’d endlessly discuss things among ourselves.”

In an essay among his papers at the New York Public Library, Rollins writes that he confided to Chinmayamananda that he had trouble meditating in the conventional manner. “He counseled me that playing my horn was a form on meditation and that my personal yogic path was karma yoga – dedicating my life to working selflessly without seeking the fruits of such work.”

He added, “The whole experience of India was so intense that when I returned to America, I was literally walking on air, something akin to levitating.”

Rollins became a life-long practitioner of yoga. “It had a tremendous influence on me,” he told another interviewer. “I was always trying to find a centre, and yoga provided that.”

Though he did perform a concert for the other students at the ashram, no one else in Bombay was privileged enough to hear the maestro play his horn. But he took trips to town with his new friends and, a decade later, they persuaded him to perform at the inaugural edition of the Jazz Yatra series of concerts in 1978.

Here’s an interview in which Rollins talks about his time in Bombay and his approach to yoga.

In 2014, he released Vol 3 of his album series Road Shows, which includes a track titled Patanjali, named after the sage who is thought to have compiled the Yoga Sutras.

Here is a recorded performance of the tune a couple of years before that.

Here’s Jehangir Dalal talking about his friendship with Rollins.

And here’s audio of Sonny Rollins’ set at the 1978 Jazz Yatra at Mumbai’s Rang Bhavan.

This article was first published on Tajmahalfoxtrot.com.