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.