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...

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