Adolfo Mejía Navarro (San Luis de Since, February 5, 1905 - Cartagena de Indias, July 6, 1973) is considered one of the most important musicians and composers in the musical history of Colombia. Born in the municipality of San Luis de Since , then Municipality of the Department of Bolívar and which is currently in the department of Sucre in Colombia . He is the son of Adolfo Mejía Valverde , treble player, juggler, goldsmith and artist, and Francisca Navarro. He is taken by his parents to the city of Cartagenaat the age of 11 years. Mejía Navarro had contact from an early age with live music played by his father and other Since musicians. She lived her childhood and adolescence in the walled neighborhood of San Diego where her love for Cartagena began to flourish, which was later poetically portrayed in the renowned bolero Cartagena. Likewise, she began to discover her talent for musical composition. He entered the Normal School of instructors. Later he participated in the choir of San Pedro Claver and in 1918 he began his professional studies at the University of Cartagena in the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters. He initially belonged to the Estudiantentina Revollo with Victor Turpín, then he played in the Eureka Orchestra ., and later belonged to the so-called first Colombian jazz orchestra, the Jazz Band Lorduy Orchestra. He spoke Arabic, Greek, German, French, Italian, and English, in addition to his mother tongue, Spanish. Adolfo Mejía was a bohemian man. In his spare time he liked to meet in a popular café in Cartagena where they talked about philosophy, the arts and recited poems. One of the places that he frequented the most was the Patio de Candita Rojas, for whom he composed a beautiful corridor with the same name years later. His favorite instrument was the Guitar , but his most notable skill was the Piano . Although this adopted son from Cartagena played several instruments, his greatest passion was composition. In 1930 he married Rosita Franco and a few months later he traveled to New York together with the musician Ladislao Orozco. He stayed there for about three years and was a member, among others, of the Albéniz Trio along with musicians Terig Tucci and Antonio Francés, a trio from Columbia and RCA . In 1933 he returns to Cartagena, to later travel to Bogotá for a long period. Starting in 1936, he studied at the National University Conservatory and worked as a librarian at the National Symphony Orchestra at the invitation of the musician and director Guillermo Espinoza Grau . In 1938, he composed what would become one of his best-known works, the Little Suite, with which he won the Ezequiel Bernal prize for composition. This is a work considered by specialists to be within the symphonic nationalist style . [ 1 ] He won a scholarship at the École Normale Supérieure (France) , dedicated to the preparation of musical pedagogues, where he took classes with Nadia Boulanger and other teachers. Due to the outbreak of the Second World War, he had to take refuge first in the south of France and then in Italy. While there he takes a ship to return to America, arriving through Brazil. There he meets Polish conductor Leopoldo Stokovsky conducting the American Youth Orchestra , with whom he travels back to New York City. He remained there until 1945, the year in which he returned to the city of Cartagena, where he established the Pro-Musical Art Society together with other intellectuals . In 1970 he was awarded the Colcultura National Music Prize and the Honoris Causa Doctorate in Humanities from the University of Cartagena. <a href="https://www.last.fm/music/Adolfo+Mejia">Read more on Last.fm</a>. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.