Gillespie Hits L.A. After Traveling World at a Dizzying Pace : Jazz: The great trumpeter, back from a tour of Eastern Europe, will play five dates at the Vine Street Bar & Grill.

It’s enough to make one dizzy.

The whirlwind pace of John Birks Gillespie’s activities of late would tax the endurance of a man half his age (that would be 36). However, the trumpeter and composer, who tonight starts a five-day run at the Vine Street Bar & Grill in Hollywood, finds the job of beating the Frequent Flyer record a little easier when, on arrival, you are greeted by such tokens as an honorary doctorate of music (to date he has received 14, the most recent from Berklee College in Boston), a National Medal of Arts (from President Bush at the White House) and packed houses from Berlin to Moscow.

“East Berlin--ooh, man, that was a knockout,” said Gillespie in a call from San Francisco. “In the afternoon we went to the Brandenburg Gate area and to a part where all the bricks had fallen down; I climbed up on the wall. People recognized me and called for me to give them some of the cement off the wall, so I threw pieces to them. In the evening my band played the Palast der Republik to 4,000 people and they went crazy! They knew all my tunes and applauded after the first bar.

“The next day in Moscow we were in this huge auditorium in the Rossia Hotel. About 150 media people came to my press conference--all the TV networks, everybody was there. At the end of the concert some Soviet musicians sat in with us and sounded good.

“Then we went to Prague, where two really fine Czech cats played with us at the Palace of Culture. I left the stage and was headed for the cocktail party, but 10 minutes later people were still applauding, and President Vaclav Havel, who was still sitting there, sent for me to come back on. We played some more, then went to the party and met Ambassador Shirley Temple Black.”

The honors continue unchecked. On June 10, Gillespie will take part in a ceremony at the Kennedy Center in Washington celebrating what is purportedly the centennial of jazz. He will receive the first annual Duke award, named for the Washington-born Edward Kennedy Ellington.

Soon afterward he will reorganize an orchestra he has led off and on for the past two years. “We have three Brazilians, a guy from Panama, one from Puerto Rico, one from the Dominican Republic and five Americans,” he said. Among the latter are the saxophonist James Moody, an intermittent colleague since 1948, and the trombonist and composer Slide Hampton, who arranged the music Gillespie composed for Winter in Lisbon.

“The first time I put this band together,” said Gillespie, “I looked at them and said, ‘Whew! We’re one big United Nation!’ So that’s what we called it--the United Nation Orchestra.”

The concept is in line with Gillespie’s perennially universal stance. For many years he has been an ardent adherent of the Baha’i faith; his Eastern European dates were accomplished partly with Baha’i support. “We have a slogan,” Dizzy said. “Peace and brotherhood--One World for Art. And that’s what I truly believe.”

Of all the new honors, Gillespie seemed most eager to talk about his recent appearance, for the first time in his 55-year career, as the leading actor in a major motion picture.

“It’s called ‘Winter in Lisbon,’ ” he said. “I play a character named Bill Swann, a jazz musician who got fed up with racism and all the other troubles over here, so he stopped recording, stopped playing, moved to Copenhagen and took a job washing cars.

“He runs into this French piano player who’s a big fan of bebop, and he starts training him, so he goes back to playing; but this French boy is involved with a girl who’s married to a gangster. It’s a complicated story with a couple of murders, and I’m all the way through it.

“Christian Vadim played the pianist. The director was Jose Zorilla. We filmed it in Spain and Portugal, but in the middle of all this I had to take off to play some dates in East Europe.”

After the East Europe tour, he was back in Portugal working on the movie, which was produced by Angel Amigo for Igueldo-Cine Productions. American distribution is yet to be arranged; meanwhile “A Night in Havana,” a 90-minute documentary made by Gillespie during one of his several visits to Cuba during the past decade, is now in worldwide release, complete with a fleeting appearance by Fidel Castro.