JAZZ : Grammys Cap Gillespie’s Dizzy Pace

Last year Dizzy Gillespie seemed to be bucking for a new honor as Most Traveled Jazz Musician. A schedule that would have taxed the resistance of a man half his age (he turned 73 last October) kept him in and out of airports in some 30 countries. On the few occasions he returned his home in Englewood, N.J., it was usually to change his clothes and be off again.

The situation reversed itself abruptly soon after 1991 began. For the first time in his 55-year career, John Birks Gillespie took five weeks off.

The sabbatical was involuntary, triggered by a cataract operation. Last week, ready to resume playing (he opens Tuesday at the Vine Street Bar & Grill), the bebop pioneer sounded rested and cheerful.

“Before, I never went more than three days without putting the trumpet to my lips,” he said. “But I’m happy that the operation went well; now I can see what’s in front of me just fine. I still haven’t touched the horn since I came home, but I’m sure everything will be all right.”

Last year was memorable for several reasons: Gillespie became one of the five Kennedy Center honorees, and that night heard his United Nation Orchestra play his most famous composition, “Night in Tunisia,” with Jon Faddis and the Cuban Arturo Sandoval taking over for a wild two-trumpet finale.

He also completed his first major acting role in a movie. “The Winter in Lisbon,” filmed in San Sebastian and Lisbon, is the story of Bill Swann (Gillespie), an embittered American musician who leaves the country, fades into obscurity in Europe, but is rescued by a young pianist (played by Christian Vadim, son of Roger Vadim).

The film, which doesn’t yet have U.S. distribution, features Gillespie playing trumpet on camera in several nightclub scenes. He also composed the score (arranged and conducted by Slide Hampton, who plays trombone in the United Nation Orchestra), and acquits himself creditably as an actor.

One scene, in which Gillespie’s character talks poignantly about his reasons for leaving America, sounds so much like Gillespie that it seemed improbable any screenplay writer could have supplied those words. “You’re right,” Gillespie says. “I ad libbed that whole scene--I didn’t even know I was gonna do it!”

Nominated for a Grammy award for an album he made with drummer Max Roach, Gillespie appeared at the Lionel Hampton Jazz Festival in Moscow, Ida. and this weekend he was due at the Black Filmmakers’ Hall of Fame ceremonies in Oakland, where, for a change, he was scheduled to give rather than receive an award, for “Didn’t He Ramble,” a film about marching bands (which he narrated).

This week Enja Records is releasing “Live at the Royal Festival Hall,” taped in London by the United Nation Orchestra, which Gillespie has fronted off and on since 1988, and in which he takes special pride, since it reflects his view of music as a unifying force. Its personnel includes three Brazilians, a Puerto Rican, three Cubans, a Dominican saxophonist, a pianist from Panama, and six Americans.

Gillespie has had a special relationship with Cuba, having been there several times in recent years. During one visit, for the Fifth International Jazz Festival of Havana, he filmed a documentary, “A Night in Havana,” in which he explored the relationship between African-American and Afro-Cuban rhythms. He even had Fidel Castro on camera (but not speaking); in some scenes he performed with such Cuban masters as the trumpeter Arturo Sandoval.

Sandoval and the saxophonist Paquito D’Rivera having defected and become U.S. residents and members of the United Nation group, Gillespie says “Yeah, I don’t know how they feel about me in Cuba now.”

With or without Havana on his schedule, he has enough work to keep the airlines solvent: appearances with symphony orchestras in Canada and the U.S.; the European tour in April, Hawaii in May, the Playboy Festival and other dates with the United Nation band in June, Spain and Italy and Yugoslavia in July, Mexico in August, South America in September, more than two weeks in the U.S.S.R. in October, a celebration of his birthday (for the third time) aboard the Norway Oct. 21 during its jazz cruise, a tour with the powerful South African singer Miriam Makeba in November, two weeks in Tokyo and Fukuoka nightclubs in December.

He’ll be back in Los Angeles May 23 for a tribute written in his honor by another old friend, the trumpeter Clora Bryant, to be premiered at UCLA.

It’ll be good to get on the road again,” he says. “I imagine I’m getting on Lorraine’s nerves.”

The Gillespies have an unusual relationship that must work, since it has lasted more than a half century. The reclusive Mrs. Gillespie (“She has real mother wit and keeps my ego at a minimum”) has not been seen at any of her husband’s appearances in decades--not even at the Kennedy Center. When their golden wedding date came up last May 9, he was in East Berlin. He simply called her up, as he does every day wherever in the world he may be. The Gillespies have no children.

If Dizzy is more than normally confident about his ability to play after a long absence, it can be attributed in part to a technicality: he has acquired a new mouthpiece for his horn. To hear him tell it, this has worked for him like a magic talisman.

“Claudio Roditi, the Brazilian trumpeter who’s in my U.N. band, had it made and gave it to me. One night in Paris he said ‘try it out. Play a low C.’ I did, and it surprised me! Then he said ‘play a G,’ and I kept going up, and every note sounded bigger. It was like the difference between writing small letters and capitals. I was playing all capital letters!

“One night I came out and hit that high C real loud--BAH! BAH!--and Arturo Sandoval said ‘No, no! don’t do that much, old man--that’s my job!’ So now I got three of these mouthpieces--one for Lorraine to keep, two to have with me on the road. So I guess I won’t have any mouthpiece trouble for the next 25, 30 years.”

A foresightful observation by a 73-year-old giant who has never looked back.