Gillespie follows you into Fat Tuesday's, where there is a large poster of himto the far left of the bandstand. And on a wall opposite the bandstand at theBlue Note, a club a few blocks west and several blocks south, where I heardGillespie perform with his quintet last year, there is a mural showing a muchyounger Gillespie in action with some of bebop's other progenitors, includingCharlie Parker, on a similar bandstand in the 1940s.

At one point last year Gillespie seemed to be everywhere I looked. I saw him onTV with Johnny Carson, Joan Rivers, and Arsenio Hall (unlike most guests ontheir programs, he wasn't promoting new "product"--he was just being DizzyGillespie), and on the promos for "The Soul of American Music," a blackmusic-awards show on which he appeared to be the token jazz musician. He eventurned up last year in an issue ofBon Appetit, in which it was revealed thathe once feasted on crocodile in Zaire and that the only thing he ever cooks athome is a breakfast of salmon with grits. In New York last June, I heard him atthree different shows in one week, all presented as part of the JVC JazzFestival. One of these was a tribute to Doc Cheatham, an indefatigabletrumpeter twelve years Gillespie's elder. The others were memorials for DexterGordon and Sarah Vaughan, both of whom died in 1990, and both of whom madetheir first important records with Gillespie, in the 1940s.

Gillespie, exercising a monarch's noblesse oblige, also appeared, unbilled, at"Bebop, Forty and Under," a JVC program that I missed. The reviews indicatedthat Gillespie, the oldest man on stage by several decades, had set the pacefor the trumpeters Jon Faddis, Roy Hargrove, and Wallace Roney on three numbersthat climaxed the show, one of which was his own "A Night in Tunisia" (which hefirst recorded with Vaughan, in 1944, under the title "Interlude").

At the three concerts I did see, Gillespie appeared to be struggling with hisintonation and reluctant to test his upper register, although he compensated bydelivering savory, low-pitched blues licks behind the singers Joe Williams andBilly Eckstine at the tribute to Vaughan. Both this show and the one honoringGordon were somber affairs, at which the mortality of the senior musicians onstage supplied an unstated theme. In contrast, the evening for Cheatham, thoughoverlong and indifferently paced, teemed with unruly virtuosity--most of itsupplied by Faddis and the trumpeters Wynton Marsalis and Ruby Braff.

Even so, whenever Gillespie moseyed onstage, he instantly became the center ofattention, and the other musicians seemed to huddle around him, as if waitingfor their cues. In the sense that this concert and the others during theweek--including "Bebop, Forty and Under"--amounted to opportunities to takemeasure of the small gains won and the enormous losses suffered by jazz inrecent years, none of them would have been complete without Gillespie'sparticipation. At this point he symbolizes jazz to those who play it and thosewho listen to them.

ILLESPIE also symbolizes jazz to those outside that circumscribed orbit. Hisname isn't included among the things that E. D. Hirsch, Jr. thinks "literateAmericans know," but then again, neither is Marlon Brando's. Lacking a hitsingle such as "Mack the Knife" or "Hello, Dolly," Gillespie isn't universallyrecognized and cherished the way Louis Armstrong was, and the likelihood isthat no jazz instrumentalist ever will be. Still, with the recent death ofMiles Davis, Gillespie is probably the only living figure from jazz whosename--reminiscent of a time when musicians as well as ballplayers were calledthings like "Dizzy," "Duke," and "Pee Wee"--rings a bell for most people.Gillespie is suddenly famous again, just as he was in the late 1940s, whenbebop's virtues were being debased in the mainstream press and (as a glance atRichard O. Boyer's delightful 1948 New Yorker profile of Gillespie reminds us)the style was identified in the public imagination with such stereotypes asberets, goatees, dark glasses, Meerschaum pipes, Islam, and flattedfifths--that day's equivalents of baseball caps turned backward, "fade"haircuts, sneakers, hood ornaments worn as medallions, Afrocentricism, and DJmixes.

Bebop's image has changed over the decades, and so has Gillespie's. In hisyouth he was regarded first as a rebel without a cause, on account of hisantics as a big-band sideman in the late thirties and early forties, and thenas a rebel with one, after his musical experiments and those of Parker and ahandful of others gradually coalesced into jazz's first avant-garde movement.Today bebop is accepted on faith as classic even by people unsure of whetherthey've ever actually heard any, and Gillespie is venerated for having been oneof its chief oracles, second in importance only to Parker, who died in 1955 andis therefore a phantom to us. Although the number of people able to name evenone of Gillespie's tunes might be small, millions of newspaper readers andtelevision viewers recognize that "bent" horn and those puffed-out cheeks.

What's missing from this image of Gillespie is what's unavoidably missing from that hologram of him in the window of Fat Tuesday's--the crackle of his music. Most accounts of Gillespie's career understandably dwell on his accomplishments in the 1940s, when every note he played was accepted as history in the making. But I happen to think that he reached his zenith in the early 1960s, a period in which he wasn't so much underrated (he has never been underrated) as taken for granted amid the clamor surrounding Ornette Coleman's free jazz, Miles Davis's and John Coltrane's modes, and Horace Silver's and Art Blakey's funk. This opinion is based, of necessity, on out-of-print records, such asSomething Old, Something New, which featured what was arguably Gillespie's finest band, with the then very young pianist Kenny Barron and the saxophonist and flutist James Moody, andGillespiana, an album-length suite written by the pianist Lalo Schifrin, Barron's predecessor in Gillespie's group. (One of several orchestral works commissioned by Gillespie around that time, in a futile attempt to beat Miles Davis and Gil Evans at their own game,Gillespiana has aged surprisingly well, and Gillespie still frequently plays its "Blues" section with his quintet.) Records, of course, can be misleading. But a friend of mine, who heard Gillespie in nightclubs on numerous occasions during this period, confirms my impression that Gillespie was then topping himself nightly.

Gillespie was so much the compleat trumpeter that it was difficult to say whichwas more impressive--his ease in unfurling lengthy and rhythmically compoundedphrases or the inflections he could squeeze out of one note. His high noteswhistled, and he tossed off entire choruses above the staff. His low notes,when he held them, frequently sounded the way he does when pronouncing the nameof his birthplace: "Chee-roh, South Carolina," spelled "Cheraw." (Althoughbebop was an urban phenomenon, it's worth considering that Gillespie andParker, its pace-setters, grew up on or near farmland.) Filled with passingchords and other harmonic brainteasers, Gillespie's solos nonetheless had arich sarcasm about them that immunized them against excess abstraction.

In jazz as in classical music, there are two types of virtuosity: theutilitarian and the utopian. The utilitarian--that of an Oscar Peterson or aFreddie Hubbard--leaves you feeling that you've just heard a musicianunsurpassed at what he does. The utopian--that of Gillespie, Parker, Armstrong,Cecil Taylor, Sonny Rollins, and Art Tatum--momentarily persuades you thathuman knowledge has evolved to such an extent that nothing is impossible. Therewas nothing that could be done on a trumpet that Gillespie in his prime couldnot do, and nothing imaginable either rhythmically or harmonically that hehadn't seemingly already thought of.

EVIEWERS used to scold Gillespie for wasting so much of his time onstagejoking around or playing Latin percussion, in an apparent effort to save hislip. But even though less effort is now expected of Gillespie (he is in hiseighth decade, after all), he continues to circle the globe as thoughcampaigning for James Brown's title "The Hardest-Working Man in Show Business."Following JVC, for example, he spent all but a few days of July playingconcerts and festivals in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. He practicallylived on the road the rest of the year, appearing in both Brazil and Californiain a single week in September, and, between engagements in Tokyo and San Juan,spending just a few days at home with his wife of fifty years, Lorraine, in NewJersey during the Christmas holidays.

Gillespie spoke with me from a Monterey, California, hotel room in October. Iasked him if he could envision a day in the near future when he would begin totake life easier. "You can't take it easy on the trumpet," he replied. "Youhave to keep at it all the time." He told me that he thought his sound was now"brighter" and "better" than ever before, as a result of a new mouthpiece thathe acquired early last year.

But the melancholy fact is that Gillespie's prowess has diminished to the pointwhere hearing him attempt to swap high notes with his protege, Jon Faddis, atthe Doc Cheatham tribute was like seeing the picture of Dorian Gray side byside with the still-unblemished Dorian. Virtuosity is as much mechanical asintellectual, and age delights in robbing virtuosos of the edge they took forgranted. Doc Cheatham remains a marvel at the age of eighty-six, but his stylenever depended on fireworks displays, even when he was younger. Gillespie'sdid, and he is no longer able to light up the skies with any regularity.

Gillespie still surrounds himself with excellent musicians, however, and hestill has his moments. At the Blue Note, where his group included Ron Holloway,an unheralded tenor saxophonist from Baltimore whose solos achieved thatremarkable combination of angularity and heft which has long been associatedwith Sonny Rollins, I heard Gillespie play a blues full of wry shadings andcomically deployed silences. He might have been lacking in the bravura that oneused to expect from Gillespie, but it was a fine solo by any other conceivablemeasure.

Gillespie remains a prolific recording artist, and each of the three albumsreleased by him last year has much to recommend it. OnBebop and Beyond PlaysDizzy Gillespie (Blue Moon R2 79170) he joins a Bay Area group led by thesaxophonist and flutist Mel Martin for a batch of tunes either written by orassociated with him. He even turns in an affecting vocal: Gil Fuller'sbeautiful "I Waited for You," a ballad that was written for and recorded byGillespie's big band in 1946. Although the trumpet solos that catch the earwith their imagination and clean execution tend to be those of Bebop andBeyond's Warren Gale, Gillespie is clearly the catalyst on this generallyspirited session. The two tracks he sits out are run-of-the-mill, latter-dayWest Coast bebop.

In 1990 Gillespie starred in and wrote the music for Jose A. Zorilla'sTheWinter in Lisbon, a European film that only recently found an Americandistributor. To judge from the synopsis that Gillespie gave me during ourtelephone conversation, Zorilla's movie explores the same ground that BertrandTavernier's'Round Midnight did. Gillespie plays a disgruntled black expatriatewho forms a bond with a young white pianist who worships him. Apparentlythere's also a subplot involving the pianist's girlfriend, a gangster whosemistress she used to be, and a stolen painting.

The soundtrack was finally released last summer (Milan 73138 35600-2), and theproblem with it is the problem with most soundtracks: motifs reworkedadinfinitum in the interest of dramatic continuity just sound repetitive whenextracted from theirmise-en scene. But what makes this soundtrack well worthhearing are the selections featuring Gillespie with the pianist Danilo Perez,the bassist George Mraz, and the drummer Grady Tate, who prod triumphant salvosfrom him on "San Sebastan," and elsewhere encourage from him anuncharacteristic lyricism so intimate that even the notes he flubs seem fraughtwith meaning.

Perez, whose spacious chordal approach recalls that of Bill Evans, although histouch is more percussive, is also the pianist onLive at the Royal FestivalHall (Enja R2 79658), a London concert recording demonstrating the many virtuesof Gillespie's United Nation Orchestra, the fifteen-member ensemble he has ledpart-time since 1988. The United Nation Orchestra--so named because it includesmusicians from Cuba, Brazil, Panama, Puerto Rico, and the DominicanRepublic--draws heavily on the classic tunes written (or co-written) byGillespie which employ South American or Caribbean rhythms (his and FrankPaparelli's "A Night in Tunisia," obviously, but also such durable items as hiscalypso "And Then She Stopped" and his and Chano Pozo's modified rumba "Tin TinDeo"). By so doing, this new orchestra begs comparison to the most fabled ofGillespie's big bands, the rough-and-ready one from the late 1940s whichbriefly included Pozo on congas and blended bebop with mambo and elements ofAfro-Cuban ritualistic music. Although hardly as innovative as that band--or astalent-laden as the one Gillespie assembled for a 1956 State Department tourand managed to keep afloat for a year or so afterward (Lee Morgan, Phil Woods,and Benny Golson all did stints in it)--this new outfit is likably volatile,thanks in large part to the trombonist Slide Hampton's gutsy arrangements.

Best of all, because the band is well stocked with such animated soloists asthe trumpeters Claudio Roditi and Arturo Sandoval, the saxophonists JamesMoody, Mario Rivera, and Paquito D'Rivera, and the trombonist Steve Turre, whoalso plays conch shells, Gillespie doesn't have to be the whole show as hesometimes does with his small band (if only to leave his audiences feeling thatthey've gotten their money's worth). What with showcases for Turre andD'Rivera, plus one shared by the singer Flora Purim and the percussionist AirtoMoreira, Gillespie doesn't even solo on every number. Sandoval, the band'shigh-note specialist, does what amounts to Gillespie's stunt work, andMoody--whose association with Gillespie dates back to the 1940s--subs forGillespie in speeding through the celebrated break in "A Night in Tunisia."Sandoval, D'Rivera, and Moreira are one-trick ponies whose lack of subtletyworks against them as leaders of their own small groups. But they soundterrific as featured attractions in Gillespie's genial musical variety show.

It's a pity that economics prevents Gillespie from touring full-time with theUnited Nation Orchestra. He has always displayed all the attributes associatedwith successful big-band leaders, including the often ignored one ofshowmanship. At several points in his career a big band seemed like the onlyformat grand enough for him. It still does, if for different reasons. At thispoint a big band also serves the purpose of allowing him to take awell-deserved breather now and then.