For Indian jazz listeners, Sonny Rollins’s death was more than a sad event worth an obituary. It opened a road back to old Bombay – to the saxophone colossus who once left applause behind, came to India with his horn and one bag, and spent time in a Powai ashram. Obituaries placed his death in Woodstock, New York. But for India, part of the story still belongs to Powai, where Rollins came not to dazzle, but to ask what music truly meant.

Rollins was born Walter Theodore Rollins in New York City in 1930 and grew up in Harlem, near the Savoy Ballroom, the Apollo Theater and Coleman Hawkins’s towering influence. He began on alto, switched to tenor at sixteen, and came of age while bebop was still burning.

In 1956, St. Thomas brought Rollins’s calypso language into modern jazz. Around the same time, Saxophone Colossus, Way Out West, A Night at the Village Vanguard and The Freedom Suite proved his gift: he could make improvisation feel composed without losing its spontaneity.

When critics and musicians were already calling him the best tenor player alive, he walked away from performing and practiced on Williamsburg Bridge. Rollins used withdrawal as work. He wanted to come back only when the next note had earned its place.

A few years later, Rollins’s Indian retreat went deeper. Already drawn to Eastern thought, yoga and meditation, he arrived in Powai in  Bombay 1967 with his saxophone and one bag. At the ashram linked to Swami Chinmayananda, a swami helped him realise that the horn itself was not an escape — it was his practice.

India’s leading Jazz Historian, Naresh Fernandes wrote how Niranjan Jhaveri and Jehangir Dalal traced rumours of an American jazz musician studying yoga near Bombay until they found Rollins at the Chinmayananda mission in Powai. Their photograph with Rollins, later seen on Taj Mahal Foxtrot, makes the episode feel alive.

Rollins later said the ashram life centred on Vedanta, the Upanishads, the Yoga Sutras and long discussions. He did not simply........

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