Nearly thirty years after a guitar solo stopped me in my tracks, I found my way back to the musician who played it—and rediscovered some of the joy that made me pick up a guitar in the first place.

I first encountered Mitch Chmara sometime in the late 1990s at City Park Jazz in Denver.

I say encountered because I didn't actually see him at first. I heard him.

Somewhere during the performance, a guitar solo came across the park that immediately caught my attention. I remember thinking, Who is this guy? The playing was ferocious. Sophisticated. Musical. It had the kind of authority that makes another guitarist stop whatever he's doing and listen.

After the performance, I found Mitch, introduced myself and asked whether he taught guitar.

He did.

I began taking lessons.

Unfortunately, the timing wasn't particularly good. I was a graduate student with limited money and even less time, and studying with someone at Mitch's level required a commitment I wasn't really capable of making then. Life intervened, as it has a habit of doing, and eventually the lessons stopped.

But I never forgot the guitarist.

Nearly three decades later, I'm studying with Mitch again.

And this time I'm beginning to understand just how fortunate I was to hear that guitar solo in City Park.

A lifetime spent learning the instrument

I've met many very good musicians over the years, including some extraordinary ones. Very few guitarists I've encountered can hold a candle to Mitch.

It isn't simply his technique, although he has plenty of it. What distinguishes him to me is the extraordinary depth of knowledge behind the technique.

Mitch seems to have spent his life asking what else the guitar can do.

His musical vocabulary reflects the people who captured his imagination: Wes Montgomery, George Benson, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Sonny Stitt, Jimi Hendrix and many others. His background is remarkably broad. In a 2014 interview, Mitch described making his living after high school by moving among rock, country, blues, R&B, jazz and classical music. He also spoke about performing and recording with musicians including Joey DeFrancesco and Richie Cole.

Eventually his search led him toward harmony and to the remarkable guitarist and educator Ted Greene, with whom Mitch studied by telephone for roughly two and a half years. Jazz Guitar Today has described Mitch as an important continuation of Greene's musical ideas and noted that Mitch's instructional work on bebop and contrary motion has reached guitarists around the world.

Yet none of those credentials quite explains what it's like to sit across from him with a guitar.

That's where I've come to appreciate Mitch most.

"I'll teach you everything I know."

At some point after I resumed lessons, Mitch said something to me that I don't remember hearing from another teacher in my life:

"I'll teach you everything I know."

I've spent a lot of time in classrooms. I've studied with professors, teachers and accomplished professionals in very different fields.

Nobody ever made me that promise.

And with Mitch, I believe it.

Every lesson is prepared in advance. He doesn't simply wait for me to arrive and ask, "What do you want to work on today?"

There is a plan.

We've worked on advanced bebop lines, chordal phrasing, blues passages, arpeggios and combinations of ideas that are gradually giving me something I've wanted for years: a framework upon which I can build a genuine understanding of jazz guitar.

Mitch will write out a line and have me play it while he accompanies me on rhythm guitar. Then we'll reverse roles.

Sometimes he'll play something in the course of a lesson that stops me.

"Wait. What was that?"

If I tell him something he just played sounded outrageously good, he'll write it down for me.

Then there's another idea.

And another.

There are lessons when I leave with so much material that I feel overwhelmed.

I love every minute of it.

Mitch also recently recommended that I get the Charlie Parker Omnibook and begin learning Parker's phrases. That recommendation says something about the way Mitch approaches jazz. The instrument may be a guitar, but the language is larger than the instrument. You don't learn jazz simply by memorizing guitar patterns. You listen to the people who developed the language.

Mitch has been doing that for a lifetime. In discussing his own development, he has described seeking out recordings by Charlie Parker, John Coltrane and Sonny Stitt to transcribe as he pursued improvisation more deeply.

Now he's encouraging me to walk some of the same road.

The quiet man behind all those notes

If you imagine someone with Mitch's ability carrying himself like a virtuoso, you'd probably be surprised when you meet him.

Mitch is quiet and unassuming.

Every lesson begins with a smile.

He's a wonderful listener. He's thoughtful. He's respectful of his own privacy and the privacy of other people. I've never once heard him speak badly about anyone.

And he loves to teach.

He's told me several times how much he enjoys our lessons. I enjoy hearing that, particularly since I'm quite certain I'm responsible for most of the talking.

There is also something wonderful about watching someone who has been playing for so many years remain fascinated by his instrument.

The enthusiasm is still there.

That matters to me.

Mastery can sometimes become strangely joyless. People spend decades becoming extraordinarily good at something and somewhere along the way seem to forget what attracted them to it.

I don't get that feeling from Mitch.

I get the feeling that he's still discovering things.

Perhaps that's one reason his knowledge runs so deep.

The strange economics of mastery

There is another reason I wanted to write about Mitch.

We live in a culture that is quite good at assigning monetary values to things and considerably less capable of recognizing value that doesn't fit neatly into a marketplace.

Music provides countless examples.

A person can devote a lifetime to an instrument—thousands upon thousands of hours listening, practicing, performing, studying, teaching and refining a craft—and still discover that extraordinary ability doesn't necessarily translate into extraordinary financial reward.

Mitch himself has said that he made a full-time living playing after high school, changing styles when necessary. The documentary JazzTown, in which Mitch appears alongside musicians including Dianne Reeves, Ron Miles and Charlie Burrell, examines this larger contradiction directly: extraordinary musicianship existing within an increasingly difficult economic environment for working jazz musicians.

Mitch has spoken with me about how difficult gigging opportunities have become.

I don't mention that because I feel sorry for him.

Quite the opposite.

It makes me question the way we sometimes measure accomplishment.

If you spend your life becoming exceptionally good at something beautiful, passing that knowledge to others, continuing to learn, and still greeting a student with enthusiasm after all those years, I think you've accomplished something rather extraordinary.

Whether the marketplace has figured out how to properly compensate you for it is a different question.

And perhaps that's one reason I want more people to know Mitch exists.

Not out of sympathy.

Because he's worth knowing.

Back to 1978

There is something else about my lessons with Mitch that I've had difficulty putting into words.

I picked up the guitar in 1978.

It was an extraordinary time to fall in love with the instrument. Great music seemed to be everywhere, and so did extraordinary guitar players. Guitar represented discovery to me then. Every record seemed to contain something I wanted to understand. Every great player made me want to pick up the instrument again.

There was an innocence to it.

You weren't thinking about whether you were good enough, whether anyone cared, whether there was money in it, or whether learning some impossible passage represented an efficient use of your time.

You played because you loved the guitar.

Mitch somehow takes me back there.

Maybe it's the long, stringy hair, or his wonderfully dressed-up version of 1970s casual: a nice jacket, suspenders, jeans and hip shoes or boots. Maybe it's the guitar itself, or the musical references. Maybe it's hearing him play something ridiculous and watching him act as though nothing particularly remarkable just happened.

And then there's one of Mitch's favorite expressions:

"Do you know what I'm saying?"

Yes, Mitch.

Increasingly, I think I do.

When I walk into his home for a lesson, something happens that I didn't expect when I decided to study guitar with him again.

For a little while, the decades disappear.

I'm not thinking about careers or accomplishments or responsibilities. I'm not thinking about how many years have passed.

I'm listening, learning, wondering what that chord was. I'm trying to get my fingers around the phrase he just wrote down, waiting to hear what comes next.

And somewhere in all of that, I'm the kid who picked up a guitar in 1978 again.

I sometimes wish I had found my way back to Mitch sooner.

But perhaps there's something fitting about finding him again now.

Mitch has spent a lifetime accumulating knowledge about an instrument I have loved for most of mine. And at this point in our lives, he is willing to sit across from me, week after week, and give that knowledge away as generously as he can.

"I'll teach you everything I know."

That's quite a promise.

I'm going to do my best to hold him to it.

But Mitch has already taught me something I wasn't expecting to learn.

He reminded me why I picked up the guitar in the first place.

And I wanted him to know how much that means.