Darryl Mori
@DMoDarryl Mori is a writer based in Los Angeles, specializing in the arts and the nonprofit sector. A Sansei and a native of Southern California, he has written for UCLA and the Japanese American National Museum, where he serves as a volunteer. He currently works in fundraising and external relations for Art Center College of Design.
Updated December 2012
Stories from This Author
Soulful Rock: The Music of Visiting Violette
March 8, 2010 • Darryl Mori
Soulful. That’s the main word that Glenn Suravech uses when asked to describe the evocative sound of his band’s lead singer.“You can take a lot for granted,” the guitarist-composer says. “But as we’re finishing our second album I’m reminded about how fortunate we are to have someone with such an incredible voice.”The band benefiting from that voice is Visiting Violette, which Suravech founded with fellow guitarist Shin Kawasaki and vocalist-songwriter Lee Takasugi. Takasugi’s textured vocals have inspired comparisons to such …
Conjuring Ghosts with Lois-Ann Yamanaka
Feb. 22, 2010 • Darryl Mori
In 1913 Hawai‘i, three young sisters suffering from tuberculosis are sent to an orphanage. Only one survives—and she finds herself haunted by the ghosts of her siblings. In her novel Behold the Many, author Lois-Ann Yamanaka employs an evocative variety of character voices to convey a tale of remorse, abandonment, and family curses.“I don’t know if this is so much a ghost story as a story with ghosts in it,” Yamanaka says. “There are many other threads in the novel and …
Allen Say: Music for Alice
Jan. 20, 2010 • Darryl Mori
“I heard about Alice from a great shiatsu master, a strapping man in his early forties, while he worked on me,” Allen Say recalls. “I had been coaching the shy man in the art of asking women for dates; when he finally did get a date, the woman turned out to be an 87-year-old dancer. That got my immediate attention.” For award-winning author and artist Say, the conversation led to an introduction to Alice Sumida, the octogenarian dancer. And the …
Dave Iwataki: Jazzing It Up
Oct. 13, 2009 • Darryl Mori
“Music is emotion,” says Dave Iwataki.“My strongest, early influence was Herbie Hancock,” the veteran arranger/composer/keyboardist notes. “I aspired to play, write and evolve like him. I felt he had the gift for putting true emotion into music.” For Iwataki, who has collaborated with major artists such as Peabo Bryson, Barry Manilow, Kenny G, The Pointer Sisters, Tom Scott, Marilyn McCoo and Billy Davis, Olivia Newton-John, Paul Anka, and The Fifth Dimension, music is also culture.As an early member of the …
The Rhythms of Life: Shasta Taiko
Sept. 25, 2009 • Darryl Mori
“This woman came up to me and said, ‘I don’t know why, but I just burst out crying when you were playing taiko,’” Jeanne Aiko Mercer says. “That happens a lot,” the pioneering taiko artist explains. “I think taiko is very healing. It’s a release, and I think people need that in their lives.” For Mercer and her husband Russel Baba, who founded the renowned Shasta Taiko group in 1985, the thundering rhythms of the taiko drum are more than …
Tabloid Tableaus: Mike Shinoda and the “Glorious Excess” of Celebrity Lives
Sept. 18, 2009 • Darryl Mori
As a leading member of the Grammy Award-winning rock band Linkin Park, Mike Shinoda knows something about fame. But he believes that he’s learned the most about fame by studying famous people he’s never heard of. “(While traveling with Linkin Park) I was watching foreign celebrity tabloid shows in London,” recalls Shinoda, who sat down with Swindle Magazine founder Roger Gastman for a public conversation at the Japanese American National Museum (JANM). “The tabloids treated each person like they were …
Songs and Searching: The Music of Kiyoshi Graves
Aug. 17, 2009 • Darryl Mori
Beside the blue waters of a Los Angeles reservoir, Kiyoshi Graves found a long-hidden path.It may be years before he learns where it leads. But following it has changed his life. “After having been away for about 10 years, I moved back to Los Angeles in 2002 from Northern California and it was a mixed bag of emotions,” Graves says. “This was after swearing, as a confused high-school dropout in my teens, that I’d never come back. I was also …
Paul Dateh: Hip Hop Virtuoso
July 31, 2009 • Darryl Mori
On his first day at the University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music, Paul Dateh—who had been studying classical violin since the age of four—abruptly dropped his major in Violin Performance. He enrolled in the Jazz Studies program instead. The change to studying more contemporary forms of music stunned former classmates, friends, and teachers, who seemed convinced that Dateh was throwing away a promising future as a musician. But in the past couple of years, many people have been …
A Jockey's Tale: Uncovering the Story of Kokomo Joe
July 1, 2009 • Darryl Mori
“What initially catches my interest in any story is the story itself—its characters, its setting, its suspense and drama, its connection to events that are much larger than the story,” says author John Christgau. “But the role of the pioneer in sports history—his creativity and determination—is one of the consistent elements in the stories I have chosen to tell.” In his critically praised new non-fiction book, Kokomo Joe: The Story of the First Japanese American Jockey in the United States …
Secret Asian Man: Breaking Barriers with a Comic Strip
May 27, 2009 • Darryl Mori
Tak Toyoshima’s Asian American-themed comic strip, Secret Asian Man, is now nationally syndicated in major newspapers across the United States. But even with daily, widespread circulation of his strips, which often touch on topics of race relations and diversity, Toyoshima says that there’s a lot about Asian Americans that the general public is still not seeing. “The emasculated Asian male stereotype bothers me a lot,” says Toyoshima. “Not only because it implies Asian guys are not attractive but because it …
