Sixty years ago, Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker were the co-creators of the music that came to be known as bebop and later, modern jazz. But the two men had very different strengths. Parker was perhaps the greatest blues player in history, while Gillespie crusaded to popularize Latin American music among North American musicians and listeners. In doing so, he helped pioneer the development of another major strain of modern music: Afro-Cuban jazz.

Those accomplishments are being celebrated this week at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola, the jazz nightclub within Jazz at Lincoln Center’s new Rose Hall. The club is being launched with a three-week festival of Gillespie’s music. The second week, which started on Tuesday and is titled “Latin Dizzy,” stars Paquito D’Rivera and his Havana-New York Ensemble. The Cuban alto saxophone and clarinet virtuoso has put together an outstanding presentation, featuring players from all over the Spanish-speaking world, including Havana, Argentina, Peru, and Chile.

Mr. D’Rivera’s septet is, in a sense, an outgrowth of Dizzy Gillespie’s last great ensemble, his United Nations Orchestra, in which Mr. D’Rivera was a featured member from 1988 until Gillespie’s death in 1993. I expected just a loose jam session on Gillespie Latin classics, but instead Senor D’Rivera presented a well-crafted program of arrangements, in part adapted from those played by the UNO.

Mr. D’Rivera is one of the more astonishing reed players around, effortlessly improvising breathtaking lines at breakneck tempos, with a beautiful tone on both horns. He is a Latin bebopper through and through, having grown up immersed in Cuban musical traditions but loving jazz. As Dizzy’s alto saxophonist, he was, in a very real way, a successor to Charlie Parker, and he can play bop standards like “Birks’ Works” with the same kind of facility. On Gillespie’s “Tour de Force” he almost sounds like the Oscar Peterson of the alto.

Latin music is primarily rhythmic, but it would be a mistake to overlook the music’s intricate tonal colors. This has to be the first time I have ever heard the bandoneon, the signature instrument of the Argentine tango, employed in a bebop context. Mr. D’Rivera very artfully employed the bandoneon for tonal color in the background of the slower ballads, and also on some of the faster ones as well. The combination of bop front line (alto and tenor) with Latin rhythm section and bandoneon was especially beautiful on “‘Round Midnight.” (The tune is correctly credited to Thelonious Monk, although Gillespie composed the introduction and transitional passages played by most musicians.)

The set opened with “Tin Tin Deo,” a Gillespie standard that often has been treated like a jam vehicle in recent times: I prefer Mr. D’Rivera’s approach, which reveled in the melody’s tropical exoticism. He also included an original chamber piece dedicated to Gillespie’s memory, “The Pan American Suite,” which employs rhythms from all over the South-of-the-Border panorama, and the pure Argentine tango, “Prelude No. 3” by the 90-year-old composer Roberto Pansera.

The new club is a beautiful room with perfect sightlines. In most jazz clubs we consider ourselves lucky just to be able to see the band; here we get a breathtaking Midtown panorama as well. The only thing to object to is the name – it seems improper (not to mention mush-mouthed) to name the place after both a corporate sponsor and a musical immortal. Either call it one or the other. I’m sure I will quickly get used to the name just the same; whatever you do, don’t order a Diet Pepsi.

The club is also to be congratulated for its announced plan to feature student musicians and ensembles during non-prime time (late, early, and on Mondays), including those from Juilliard and the Manhattan School of Music. On Tuesday night, the Manhattan School of Music gave a concert with its own Afro-Cuban Jazz Orchestra, under the direction of veteran percussionist and scholar Bobby Sanabria.

Its focus was “Tanga” by Mario Bauza, generally regarded as the first successful fusion of Cuban music and hardcore jazz. The two musics were combined not only by Gillespie, working from inside the jazz tradition, but by the Havanaborn Bauza, who wrote “Tanga” in 1943. The piece is surprisingly modern: It’s hard to think of anything else written 60 years ago that would sound consistent with a bebop alto solo and a Coltrane-esque tenor solo.

I have no idea if Dizzy ever drank Coca-Cola, but I can’t help but think that wherever he is, he’s dancing the samba.