Soli Sorabjee was 18 when he walked into a record store in Bombay, as Mumbai was then called, and asked for a recording of the Hungarian Dances by Brahms. At home, he took a listen.
“I found it nothing like Brahms at all,” he told a television interviewer. “So many different sounds.” But he liked the tune on the presumably unlabeled or mislabeled record and played it again, and then a third time. “It happened to be ‘Tiger Rag’ by the Benny Goodman Trio,” he said. “The bug had bitten.”
Mr. Sorabjee became a passionate and lifelong jazz fan — as well as one of India’s leading jurists, a two-time attorney general, a constitutional expert and a champion of free speech.