Had Walter Theodore ‘Sonny’ Rollins not been drawn to spiritualism, jazz would not have come back to India in 1978 with a big bang. The eclectic musical form, often considered homologous to Hindustani classical in its creative autonomy, arrived early—by steamships carrying black American musicians on long sojourns to Bombay in the 1930s and through musically-gifted soldiers stationed in Calcutta during the Second World War. In 1938, travelling Filipino musicians even brought the form to Bihar’s Jamalpur, then a bustling industrial town. After a few post-independence decades when every metropolis hosted live jazz venues and Bollywood music directors generously borrowed from its standards, the tempo slowed down.
Meanwhile Rollins, who grew up in 1930s’ New York surrounded by Bengali lascars who had jumped ships and sheltered from anti-Asian sentiments in the black neighbourhood of Harlem, flowered into one of the most versatile jazz saxophonists of all time. At a time bebop jazz was seen as the foot-tapping swing era’s cerebral nephew headlined by Charlie Parker, Rollins refused to be boxed into a style. After a memorable pas de deux with trumpet maestro Miles Davis in the early 1950s, he went his own way. But like John Coltrane, the bebop virtuoso who replaced Rollins on Davis’s quintet in 1955, Sonny took time off in the 1960s to immerse in Indian spiritualism. And that’s how he came to stay at a Chinmayananda ashram in Bombay, where jazz aficionados built bridges strong enough to invite him back to headline the first Jazz Yatra, an annual fest that has endured in various forms.
It’s not music alone that made Rollins stand out in a galaxy of stars. During an era when jazz giants like Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Nat King Cole were criticised for being too soft in countering racism in a segregationist US, Rollins composed a 19-minute protest piece for ‘Freedom Suite’. It’s poignant that this ‘colossus’ passed at 95, just a few weeks after the US Supreme Court gutted the 1960s’ civil rights laws that Rollins and others had fought so hard for. But it does not take anything away from the diverse oeuvre left by six decades of open-hearted music-making. Whether it’s the Calypso swagger of ‘Old Devil Moon’ or the Celtic cries of ‘How are things in Glocca Morra’, there is always something for everyone.
