About Westville Guitars

 "Westville" is a translation of my last name "Nishimura", and Westville Guitars was founded by myself in 2013. All the Westville guitars are designed by myself and handcrafted with skilled hands in a guitar factory in Japan, and then done final setup by myself in my workshop.

 My career in musical instruments business started in 1991. In 1998, I met a luthier Taku Sakashta for the first time at a guitar show in New York. 8 years later, we started our new partnership in order to reestablish Taku’s guitar brand “Jazz Guitar Designs” which had been halted at that time. And in 2009, we could finally complete three kinds of prototype guitars “Focus Concept 1”, ”Focus Concept 2”, and “Crossover”.

  In February 2010, some pilot run models of “Crossover” and “Focus Concept1” were on the way to be completed and everything went smoothly. But before those guitars were released, Taku passed away in an unfortunate incident. It was also almost the same period when I and Kurt Rosenwinkel started our collaboration.

 After that, I started my own design work from scratch to make my original guitars. And in 2013, at last the first two brand new prototype guitars were completed. The each guitar was semi-hollow model with solid carved spruce top and solid carved hard maple back. The both models were named “Butter” and “Water” by Kurt himself. And soon after that the “Butter” made its debut with his performance at “Blue Note Tokyo” in Japan and also at the tribute concert in “Kennedy Center Honors 2013” ceremony in US.

 Recently, I have released two kinds of brand new full-hollow models “Aruba” and “Solar”, and also Kurt Rosenwinkel Signature “Vanguard” series in 2016. I'm honored now to know that many artists play Westville guitars and it is a great pleasure to me to contribute to their creativity.

Masaki Nishimura / Westville Guitars