I was watching the infamous Rosenberg Trio video last night, which is a tape of a show during 2001 I think. Its about time that I have seen it after having been trying to play gypsy jazz for 3 years now. It is amazing how well this video goes along with the Robin Nolan lesson books. It is the perfect supplement to those books and is such a good match that it seems to the inspiration for those publications.
With some of my soloing ideas in mind as I watched Stochelo play, I tried to catch the patterns that he plays and I caught one very strong one. I saw him play the standard harmonic minor pattern exactly as written and I saw him do it quite often. As a matter of fact, if you break the scale into the 5 position model, I saw him use at least 4 of those 5 positions, and mostly the 2nd and 3rd. I also saw Stochelo play through many measures at a time without using arpeggios mixed in. This is a huge validation for me as a player, because I have not been confident that doing this was correct. I always suspected that I should mix the harmonic minor with apeggios of various chord substitutions, but now I realize that this is not necessary and you are not REQUIRED to do this, and now I can breathe a bit easier.
It seems that soloing with speed is quite enough to get by but if you indeed proceed with speed you must have enough speed to have room for the moment of tension and let the melody into the song during these moments. It also seems that the more speed you have the more room you will have to play with the tension and I see this in the playing of Stochelo.

I thought I should post at least once to my weblog and let people know that the things that I say in my weblog should not be taken too seriously. I am not a teacher and I have not been taught by anyone with authority. Everything that I mention on my website should be taken only as opinion.
In some cases there could be errors in my postings and in other cases they could be untrue. On other subjects I may post something because I want to be controversial and I am merely playing devils advocate. And in the lucky cases where I have a valid epiphany, then the information is of value.
All in all, I am very serious about playing guitar and I want to try to help other people learn and I feel that my sharing of my ideas, although they are not always reliable, can help other people while they are also on their journey to become gypsy jazz guitar players. I hope this helps anyone who reads through my postings to understand me and my purpose in creating this site. In the end, I hope to have this huge collection of notes that I have gathered on my journey and those notes will me most valuable to me for my own use.
By the way, if anyone out there thinks they would want to post to my site once in a while, I may be willing to create an authoring account for you so that you can add your own comments.

I attended my first guitar workshop this last weekend. It was given by none other than the entire Pearl Django band. Split between about 10 workshop attendees, it was a fantastic deal to get for just a few bucks.
The thing that surprised me was that this wasn’t merely just a guitar workshop after all. It seems that if you showed up with just about any instrument, one of them would be glad to help you out and give a few pointers. Two violin players showed up and got a lesson with Michael Gray. No bass players turned up, but if they had, they probably could have got a one on one lesson with Rick Leppanen.
Me and three other guitar players had a private little 1 hour lesson with Neil Andersson and it was eye opening. At the end, we each took 3 turns taking a lead on the song J’Attendrai. I wish I had been practicing for the last five months though, because I couldn’t remember a single arpeggio and I had to resort to playing by ear, which wasn’t very pretty. I have to laugh though, because Neils description of my playing was “heavy metal lead”. It just goes to show that practice is very important.

I just heard that this film is being released in DVD format on April 16, 2003, in France. The technical details are: Zone 2, pal, format 2.35, 16/9 compatible 4/3, son 5.1 et stéréo, DVD 9, couleur, 87 mn. How I am going to get a hold of it, I don’t know, but I will try to figure something out.
Not much has been heard about this film since it was announced. As far as I know, Tony Gatlif’s “Swing le film” was shown as part of the Chicago International Film Festival, which was from October 4-18 of 2002. Also, I noticed that Tchavolo Schmitt and Mandino Reinhardt are now listed as actors in the IMDB internet database, which I think is really cool.
The film is about Max, who is ten years old. He becomes a fan of Jazz manouche, which he discovers while listening to Miraldo, a virtuoso of the guitar. This music becomes his passion and he travels to the district of the manouches where he buys an old guitar. Thanks to the lessons that Miraldo is willing to give him, Max begins the training of the music and the culture of manouches. Very quickly, he becomes the friend of Swing, a young manouche of his age with whom he develops a fascinating magnetism, who becomes his insurance and his freedom.