It would be hard to think of a man in all of American music more loved and respected than John Birks “Dizzy” Gillespie (1917-93). Gillespie will be remembered not just as one of jazz’s all-time greatest virtuoso trumpeters – second only, perhaps, to Louis Armstrong – but as a bandleader who gathered great sidemen and led ensembles large and small for nearly 50 years. As a composer, he wrote dozens of jazz standards still heard in clubs today.

Gillespie was, in fact, Armstrong’s greatest heir. Both trumpeters were leaders of their respective avant-gardes. They set styles that all the musicians of their generation – not only brass men -then followed. At the same time, they were irrepressible entertainers, comics, funsters, cut-ups. They didn’t mug to please a crowd or merely to be popular; they did it because they loved to do it. Their “serious” and “comic” sides were equally important, and equally sincere. Both were there, in Armstrong’s memorable phrase, “in the cause of happiness.”

During the next three weeks, Dizzy Gillespie’s 87th birthday is being celebrated all over New York, partly because it happens to coincide with the opening of “Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola,” the club within Jazz at Lincoln Center’s new Columbus Circle complex.

Jazz at Lincoln Center has decided to kick things off with a run of performers playing Gillespie’s music, and the Blue Note has been kind enough to offer up a complementary slate. Several new historical CD releases of Dizzy in performance complete the package.

Nothing could be more appropriate than the Blue Note’s series of jam sessions dedicated to Dizzy. Bebop was born from the jam sessions of Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Kenny Clarke, and Thelonious Monk, which established a whole new language for jazz. Gillespie’s experiments of the 1930s and 1940s extended the primacy of harmonic improvisation and strengthened it, relying on more musically substantial intervals (particular the upper reaches – the ninths and above – still used by harmonic improvisers today).

Gillespie – unlike Parker, who he referred to as “the other half of my heartbeat” – lived to become a tireless proselytizer for the music. He was never too busy to take younger musicians (most famously Lee Morgan and Jon Faddis) under his wing. The group saying happy birthday at the Blue Note includes trombonist and arranger Slide Hampton, trumpeter Roy Hargrove, pianist Benny Green, and Italian scat specialist Roberta Gambarini. For the first few days, bop alto giant Jackie McLean will guest star; another irrepressible trumpeter-funster, Clark Terry, takes over on the weekend.

Interestingly, Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola is actually the second performance space in the city named for the man: The John Birks Gillespie Auditorium can be found at the Baha’i Center – Gillespie was a convert to the Baha’i faith – and on October 26 it will host a show by former Gillespie sideman, pianist Mike Longo (a rare 1968 concert film of Dizzy Gillepsie’s Quintet in Copenhagen will be screened afterward.)

The nightclub within Time Warner Center, meanwhile, will open on his actual birthday – this Thursday, October 21 – with pianist Bill Charlap leading his trio plus two guest horns, alto saxophonist Charles McPherson, and trumpeter Nicholas Payton. The second week, “Latin Dizzy,” will feature Cuban multi-reed player Paquito D’Rivera, who worked with Dizzy in the United Nations Orchestra.

Gillespie was the first major jazz musician to draw attention to Afro-Latin music. His big band of the late 1940s extensively featured the innovative Cuban percussionist, Chano Pozo, and Gillespie continued to experiment with Latin rhythms and forms for the rest of his life. The new release “Afro” (Verve 314 517 052-2) is a perfect complement to “Latin Dizzy.”

This disc is divided into two segments, each of which originally occupied one side of an LP.The first is an extended composition played by the trumpeter and a full orchestra, composed and arranged in collaboration with the great Cuban maestro Chico O’Farrill. The remaining three titles frame the Gillespie horn with a Latin rhythm ensemble, resulting in definitive versions of Gillespie’s oft-played Latin standards.

Gillespie had recorded Latin music earlier (notably the extended composition “Cubana Be, Cubana Bop”) and would later, but this 1954 album for Norman Granz (who produced most of Dizzy’s best albums) consolidates these achievements in a remarkable way. The best recordings of “Manteca,” “A Night in Tunisia,” and “Con Alma” are all here, and a higher recommendation than that I cannot give.

Like his contribution to Latin jazz, Dizzy’s efforts to keep big band jazz alive are underappreciated. Though bebop was accused of putting the big swing bands out of business, Gillespie was an unceasing supporter of the format, responsible for much of the best orchestra jazz of the postwar era. It’s fitting that, during Jazz at Lincoln Center’s third week in its new digs, Victor Goines will lead the Juilliard Jazz Orchestra in a program starring the soulful vocalist Carla Cook.

Seeing all these musicians playing the master’s music will be splendid, but there’s nothing like the real thing. For this I recommend the newly released disc “Salt Peanuts: Live In Montreal, 1981” (Just a Memory JAM 9161-2).The charm of this performance is very personal: This is how I remember Dizzy from seeing him many times in the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s. “Diz the Wiz” was 65 at this point, but his trumpet chops were rich and full, and his zeal to please his crowds was undiminished.

The Gillespie standards on the program reflect the leader’s ongoing status as a peripatetic world citizen: “Green Dolphin Street,” “Girl From Ipanema,” and “A Night in Tunisia.” “Tin Tin Deo” and “The Land of Milk and Honey” take him to yet other parts of the globe, the latter being a folk tune from Israel (originally titled “Eretz Zavat Chalav Udvash”) – highly fitting for a jazzman who almost always wore a Star of David. And “Salt Peanuts” and “Swing Low, Sweet Cadillac” give him the chance to sing.

For me, this disc was a delightful confirmation that Dizzy was just as exciting in his elder-statesman phase as I remember him. “Old Cadillacs never die,” says Diz on the disc, “The finance company just takes them away.”