Guitarrón
A Franco-Colombian musician, composer and instrumentalist playing the «guitarrón» (traditional Mexican acoustic bass), Nelson Gómez was born in Manizales, Colombia, where he began his musical studies in the 1970s and created various groups of traditional Colombian music.
Since 1982, he has lived in France where he studied composition with Katori Makino and classical guitar with Francis Verba at the Paris Conservatory. He also studied arrangement and orchestration with François Théberge at the IACP (Paris Jazz School).
He is a founding member of the Ambar group created in 1999, an ensemble internationally recognized for the quality and originality of its interpretations of «popular cultivated» instrumental music from Latin America, particularly Colombia, Venezuela and Brazil. The traditional musical genres approached and treated in a modern way are, for example, Colombian pasillo and bambuco, Venezuelan joropo and merengue, and Brazilian choro and samba.