He’s Doing All Wright for Himself : Music: New-Age pianist Danny Wright has, largely by word-of-mouth, sold more than 2 million records nationwide. He’ll play in Tustin Wednesday.

Danny Wright’s name may not ring much of a bell in the Southern California music community, but he’s been selling records big time around the country.

The Fort Worth, Tex.-born pianist, who performs Wednesday at Tower Records in Tustin and Saturday at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego in La Jolla, has sold a total of more than 2 million copies of the eight albums he has recorded. It’s quite an achievement for a regional artist on a small label.

His recordings, which generally can be found in the New Age bins, actually defy category. The first, “Black and White,” ranges from Wright’s reading of Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” to a “Barbra Streisand Medley.” His second album, “Time Windows,” consists of original compositions for piano and Synclavier. Successive releases have been similarly eclectic and equally difficult to codify.

Remarkably, until two years ago, most of Wright’s sales were made without benefit of advertising, with relatively few public performances and with only modest radio airplay--a rare instance of a music-business Cinderella story taking place outside the usual media arenas.

“It’s really happened by word of mouth,” said Wright, a 30-year-old with surfer-blond hair, during a conversation at lunch last week. “People just seem to tell each other about the records.”

“And not just each other,” interjected Dori Nichols, Wright’s producer and the owner of Moulin D’Or Records, which has released all of Wright’s albums. “We get letters--lots of letters. I kid you not . . . .

To underscore her point, Nichols offered a few examples: a missive from a woman in El Paso who wrote of “the sublime, transporting, soaring, unearthly beauty and sadness and joy” of Wright’s music; a four-page letter from a physician in Wyoming who made an analogy between hearing Wright’s piano and “the intense peacefulness one experiences after making love to someone that they deeply admire, respect and love”; and a testimonial from a Fort Worth playwright who broke through a writer’s block while listening to one of Wright’s albums: “I laughed . . . I cried . . . I felt pain . . . I knew joy . . . My dreams have now taken flight. Thank you for the miracle!”

Wright’s success has been inextricably entwined with the efforts of Nichols and her husband, Bob, who first heard him playing for $30 a night and leftover food in a Fort Worth Italian restaurant.

“We walked into the place where Danny was working just by chance,” Nichols said. “And we could not believe what we heard. It was just beautiful.”

As impressed as they were with Wright’s playing, the Nicholses had not envisioned any professional association. Bob Nichols had spent most of his life working for General Dynamics, and Dori Nichols designed sweaters and taught knitting.

“But when they found out that I didn’t have a recording,” Wright said, “they just kind of sprung into action.”

“It was kind of sudden,” Nichols added with a laugh. “Bob and I just turned to each other and said, ‘Let’s do it.’ Fortunately, we knew absolutely nothing about the music business, so we weren’t knowledgeable enough to know all the difficulties of putting out a record. But we found out--fast.”

When the Nicholses discussed making an album with Wright, he was enthusiastic, if somewhat doubtful. None of them had the faintest idea of how to go about it.

“I finally called my half-brother, who had a few connections,” Wright said, “and he steered us to a management company that helped us with graphic designs, recording studios and things like that. That was enough to get us through the first album. We made 400 LPs and 350 cassettes. And then we sat there and said, ‘What are we going to do with all these things?’ ”

Nichols and Wright took the only practical step they could think of: They loaded up a car with boxes of tapes and LPs and started going from store to store trying to place them for consignment sales.

“The funny thing is that what happened a lot of times,” Wright recalled, “is that the store owners would say, ‘OK, let’s hear what you’ve got.’ They would play the album over the sound system and before it was finished, customers would literally be buying copies right out of the box. It was amazing.”

Surprisingly, Wright comes from a background with few creative associations. His father, Clinton D. Wright, is a former real estate developer who built Fort Worth’s first all-electric home in the ‘50s; before she retired, his mother, Gloria, was an interior designer.

Wright recalls little awareness of music around the house when he was a child, and he remembers how startled his parents were when he suddenly picked out the melody of the theme from the film “Dr. Zhivago” on the piano when he was 4.

When he began taking lessons, further indications of a precocious talent quickly emerged.

“I started off by improvising my own melodies in the middle of classical pieces, and my piano teachers would screech,” he said. “I was taking Mozart and Beethoven and arranging their music the way I thought it should be arranged. Fortunately, I finally found a teacher who encouraged me, at a very early age, to explore my own possibilities. I think that had a lot to do with how I developed as a musician.”

Even with the significant indicators of a gifted and growing talent, however, his parents, he believes, were far more interested in directing him toward a career in real estate.

“They were willing to give me the lessons,” Wright said, “but my father really wanted me to be like he was, even though today he points out my records to friends and says, ‘That’s my son.’

“But at the time,” Wright said, “I don’t even think he wanted me to practice, and that just made me practice more. In fact, I think that was the key to what made me so determined to become a musician.”

By the time he was 16, Wright was on his own, supporting himself by playing easy-listening music in restaurants. At college, he studied music education, “although I knew that never in my wildest dreams did I ever want to do that to make a living.”

Even in the leanest years, when the Nicholses often fed Wright and occasionally made sure his rent was paid, he never doubted his skills or his potential.

“I’ve always known that my talent was a gift from God,” he said. “It came too easily for me. It’s still easy. I can compose a piece in 45 minutes if I’m inspired at that moment. And, as a kid, I could memorize a sonata in a day. It just came naturally, my whole life. So I knew that I was given that talent for a reason. I feel that the kind of music I compose and play comes from my soul, and that’s what makes it possible for it to touch other souls.

“People ask me, ‘When are you going to change, Danny? When are you going to become an arrogant, no-good show biz star?.’ “And I say, ‘Never, I hope.’

“Because I don’t think I’ll ever forget where I came from. And I know I’ll never forget all the people out there whose lives I’ve been lucky enough to touch.”

* Pianist Danny Wright will perform from 7 to 8 p.m. Wednesday at Tower Records, 2881 El Camino Real, Tustin. (714) 731-9295. He also will play at 7:30 p.m. Saturday at Sherwood Hall at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, 700 Prospect St., La Jolla. $20. (619) 278-TIXS.