Taka Nawashiro (苗代尚寛) is a guitarist and composer from Tokorozawa in Saitama Prefecture. His given name is Takahiro, and "Taka" is the name he records under. He studied at Berklee and then at the New School in New York, graduated in 2020 with the John Coltrane Award (an ABC Jazz feature in Australia calls it the John and Alice Coltrane Award), and now works in Tokyo. A post on his own X account dated 6 January 2025 says he had turned 32 the day before, which puts his birthday on 5 January 1993. He has made two jazz albums under his own name, What We Do Now (2020) and Lifescape (Universal Music, 2024), and two ambient releases, How We Travel Now (2021) and Sprouting (2025).

Singing came first. In junior high he was a part leader in the choir, whose advisor and his own homeroom teacher was the choral composer Takao Matsui. He had taken violin lessons from the age of five to ten, without enjoying them much, and he started guitar at fifteen. When his voice broke and he could no longer sing what he heard in his head, the guitar took over. In high school he played so many hours a day that tendonitis sometimes left him unable to hold a rice bowl, and he studied during the enforced breaks because he meant to become a doctor: his father is a neurosurgeon, and he grew up among medical books and head MRI scans. His mother, a music-college graduate, was the one who worried about the music plan. By then he wanted to work as a session guitarist, and the players he liked were Wes Montgomery and Pat Metheny.

He decided on jazz at about eighteen. His mother pointed out that jazz was born in the United States, and he prepared to study there while still in Japan. His official site says he went to Berklee College of Music in Boston on a scholarship in 2015 and in 2017 moved to the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music in New York, again on a scholarship. He has said he thought arriving with little formal jazz study would let him hear the music without preconceptions. At the New School he was chosen for the student representative band and played at the Jazz Education Network conference in New Orleans. His label biography names his guitar teachers as Hideaki Yahagi (矢萩秀明), Steve Cardenas and Yotam Silberstein, and his composition teachers as Ben Allison and Linda Oh. In an interview with Arban he adds that he also took lessons from Peter Bernstein, that the pianist Jon Cowherd taught him composition privately, that E.J. Strickland taught him what he calls "drum language," and that Allison taught him composition and the bassist's way of approaching a tune. He spent a long stretch copying the jazz giants day and night and analysing how Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole shaped a melody, with Jim Hall and Charlie Christian among the lines he wanted to inherit. The stretch ended when he suddenly wanted to write his own pieces. He showed them to Silberstein, who asked whether he had lost interest in standards, and he answered that he was interested but had more to say himself; Silberstein told him to go ahead.

He graduated in May 2020, in the middle of the first pandemic lockdown, and stayed in New York until October. Before he left he made an album with the teachers and friends he had worked with there. What We Do Now was recorded in October 2020 at Bunker Studio in New York, with strict Covid precautions, with Ben Allison on bass, E.J. Strickland on drums, Milena Casado Fauquet on flugelhorn and Judette Elliston on voice. Akihiro Nishimura mixed it, Alex DeTurk mastered it, and the artwork is by MÖSHI. It has five tracks, four of them his own compositions plus the standard "Alone Together," and he released it on Bandcamp on 25 December 2020. Earlier that year he had played on the self-titled debut of DeeperDreamer, an international band formed in New York, recorded in January 2020 at Figure 8 Recording Studio in Brooklyn and released on 1 September 2020; the other members are the harmonica player Ariel Bart, pianist Hanna Inui, bassist Vinicius Cajado and drummer Rintaro Mikami. In January 2021 he put out How We Travel Now, six short ambient pieces assembled during the lockdown, with the flutist Kana Miyamoto and the tenor saxophonist Tomoaki Baba among his collaborators.

Back in Japan he began playing ambient music regularly, mostly at No Room For Squares in Shimokitazawa, and he recorded some of those sets, which later became Sprouting. In jazz he became a sought-after guest on other leaders' records: the composer Eri Chichibu's debut Crossing Reality (Reborn Wood, September 2022); the Keio University Light Music Society's From Where The Sun Rises (February 2023), where he is the featured guest on the 13-minute "Breath of the City 'Seattle'," composed and arranged by Ryo Otomo, on an album whose other featured guests include Shun Ishiwaka, Ryo Kusunose, Tomoaki Baba and Yu Kuga; Ishiwaka's Songbook VI (March 2023), where he is billed as a guest on one track; Kurena Ishikawa's debut Kurena (March 2023), on which Discogs credits him with guitar on "Sea Wasp" and "No One Knows"; and the young drummer and keyboardist Gaku Kano's Experimental Jazz (2024), which features him on two tracks. The critic Kazunori Harada says he first heard him at a concert by Yuta Omino's large ensemble.

Lifescape, his second album and his first for a major label, came out on 18 September 2024 on Universal Music (catalogue UCCJ-2239, Universal Jazz), preceded in August by the single "WindBeast." He has said he began wanting a second record in early 2022 and that the idea was to put everything he had into it, drawing together the musicians he had worked with in New York and in Tokyo. The basic tracks were recorded in New York by two bands. One was a quartet of Allison, Strickland and the pianist Victor Gould with Nawashiro, which plays on five tracks. The other was Cowherd and the bassist Kanoa Mendenhall, to whom Ishiwaka added drums in Tokyo on "Kobune" and "Lifescape." Baba plays tenor saxophone on "Actual Proof," and two tracks feature vocals, Ruri Matsumura on "Promise of 60" (she also wrote its lyrics) and Ishikawa on "Kobune." Seven of the eight pieces are his own; the exception is "Actual Proof," the funk tune by Herbie Hancock, recast as a ballad. "Song For Orange" is a duo with Cowherd, a recording he had planned for 2020 until Cowherd came down with Covid the day before the session. The title is a coinage on the composer R. Murray Schafer's "soundscape": he began the piece picturing a person walking while the scenery slides past, an image that came from driving, and he imagined the view from a small boat while writing "Kobune."

He made his Cotton Club debut as a leader in Marunouchi on 21 October 2024, with Baba, the pianist Kento Tsubosaka, the bassist Marty Holoubek, Ishiwaka on drums and Ishikawa as guest. Tower Records promoted the album heavily and announced mini-live and signing events at its stores in Gifu on 29 December 2024 and in Kanazawa, Akashi and Higashiura in January 2025. In Japan the record was reviewed or discussed by JazzTokyo (Tomoyuki Kubo, 31 August 2024), Arban, Everything Jazz, Mikiki (an interview originally in intoxicate magazine), Jaz.in and several blogs, and in February 2025 ABC Jazz in Australia made it a feature album, welcoming him as an explosive new entrant to the global jazz scene.

On 2 October 2025 he released Sprouting, an EP of five ambient pieces that he calls his second ambient work. He selected the recordings from ambient sets he had played since returning from New York, choosing the ones he still liked hearing, and released it himself, with a video produced and directed by Ai Nonaka. In September 2025 he recorded a free-improvisation duo with the pedal steel guitarist Asuka Mori at the Taro Okamoto Memorial Museum in Tokyo, issued as a video in the Days of Delight Atelier Concert series in April 2026. With Mori, the bassist Keisuke Furuki and the percussionist Kan he leads a group called Yellow Cabinet, which played Blue Note Place in Tokyo on 1 February 2026 with Ishikawa as guest and has released live-session videos filmed at Suzume Coffee, among them his original "Wah Wah Blues" and an arrangement of George Harrison's "Something." In September 2026 he was named among the musicians on Ishikawa's second album, Garden. He has been an endorsing artist for Soulezza Guitars since 2019 and offers private lessons through his site.

Nawashiro's own verdict on his playing is that it is strange: he says both his phrasing and his guitar sound are odd, enough that engineers and PA operators have trouble placing microphones for him. Critics put it differently. Tomoyuki Kubo in JazzTokyo hears a clear, sweet tone with a solid core, and picks out a "WindBeast" solo built from carefully laid sixteenth-note phrases. Harada hears a round, well-articulated tone and a touch that quietly bridges the horns and the rhythm section. The writer of the Mikiki and intoxicate interview describes phrasing that joins speed to a floating quality, with a refined sense of harmony. A jazz-guitar blogger found the tone delicate, organic and rich, and the Jaz.in writer heard a pull between the ambition to be a mainstream jazz guitarist and the wish to bring non-jazz listeners along.

His main guitar is a custom headless Soulezza made by the Spanish luthier Fernando de Oleza. He went looking for a small guitar with a warm tone because the 17-inch archtop he used before gave him trouble on airplanes, and he says the late John Abercrombie's Soulezza helped him imagine the sound in advance. Live he alternates it with a Fender Mustang, which he calls a wild horse for how little it does what he wants. He composes on guitar alone, with no software, and hands players spare lead sheets without explaining the piece, hoping for good accidents, then decides afterwards which of their ideas to keep. Singing remains the center of his music, and he wants his guitar to carry the quality of a song; his official biography adds that he writes lyrics as well as music, so that even his instrumental pieces are lyrical.

His official biography names many guitarists as influences, not only jazz players but rock and fusion players too. He has said that after studying with Peter Bernstein he decided he did not want to make the same kind of sound, though he remains a fan, and that Cowherd's work with Brian Blade's Fellowship band is a favorite. His output falls into two lines: acoustic-band jazz, which is What We Do Now and Lifescape, and ambient guitar and sound-texture music, which is How We Travel Now and Sprouting. His Bandcamp page tags the debut as both jazz and ambient, while Apple Music files Sprouting under New Age. He calls himself a sound painter as well as a guitarist and composer, and his site says he works with dancers and visual artists.