AMERICA’S COOLEST COLD WAR WEAPON: One late, dark and rainy night in New York –circa 1981 to 1983– on some obscure cable channel on Manhattan’s then obscure (and now long gone) cable system, I perchance heard an interview with Dizzy Gillespie in which the bop jazz great talked about playing a gig in eastern Europe on one of those “State Department” tours. The interview was in black and white video. The tv was a color tv — perhaps this is a clue to the date of the interview. Anyway, Mr. Gillespie told the interviewer the police in this eastern European despotism brought dogs into the venue to confront the crowd while his band was on stage. That struck him as, you know, awkward, and, well, awful. This is my interpretation — the cops and dogs struck him as cold and chilling and cruelly inappropriate. As I remember the interview, prior to his comment about the cops and dogs, Mr. Gillespie remarked on how much eastern European audiences enjoyed American jazz and how that delighted him. Perhaps I incorrectly recollect the specifics, but somewhere out there the video exists. I got to hear Dizzy play live twice and he was electric.