By Carl Zebrowski
Editor

John Bayless was not Liberace (for those who remember Liberace and his scintillating rhinestone suits and polished candelabra atop his grand piano—and his performance prowess). But Bayless was heavily inspired by Liberace, working incessantly to amass showmanship and piano skills by the shiny silver champagne bucketful.

The young Bayless could play seemingly anything, both hands flying up and down the keyboard, and jumping up for appearance’ sake to arm’s-length height above the keys. Bach, Rachmaninoff. Also Ellington, the Beatles. The crowd stood on cue in enthusiastic admiration. Then came a massive stroke.

On March 16, an audience at the Frank Banko Alehouse Cinemas at Bethlehem’s ArtsQuest watched a documentary about Bayless’s life before and after the stroke that shut down his right side in 2008. Director Stewart Schulman’s documentary “Left Hand Rhapsody: The Musical Memoir of Pianist John Bayless” showed Bayless touring the world to play to packed houses, struggling through physical therapy after the stroke, practicing full piano pieces left-hand-only, converting to Judaism, and eventually returning to touring to perform and to spread his inspirational story. After the film screening at this afternoon event cosponsored by the Jewish Federation of the Lehigh Valley, Bayless and Schulman answered questions from the audience. Then came an inspiring live performance.

As the film explains, Bayless grew up in Texas, living a childhood filled with medical problems and surgeries. “I couldn’t run or play or roughhouse like other kids did,” he says, “and the piano became my friend…. I could play pretty much everything I heard by ear.” He didn’t mean “Twinkle, Twinkle” and “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” More like Gershwin and Chopin.

After playing piano in Baptist churches throughout his teenage years—“At 15, I was the youngest church pianist in the state of Texas”—he met the composer and director Leonard Bernstein. Bernstein became his mentor. Bayless shared Bernstein’s belief that an artist always has to keep his audience in mind: “A composer today needs to compose in the vernacular of the people.” Bernstein did that to famous effect with his musical “West Side Story.”

With Bernstein’s tutelage and musical studies at New York University, Bayless became a composer. He visited the influential William Morris Agency to secure top-notch management for turning music into a career. Soon he was traveling farther and farther from his home base to perform. 

By the mid-1980s, Bayless was big. While Michael Jackson, Madonna, and Phil Collins were all over the hit charts, Bayless had hits of his own in his own genre, rooted in classical music but crossing over into pop. He was traveling all over the world, playing to packed houses, with an orchestra or solo. 

Then lightning struck. Literally a stroke. His partner, the TV director and producer Bruce Franchini, found him having trouble breathing. His right side was limp. Franchini saved his life.

In an instant Bayless’s high-flying performance career was halted—make that paused—as his ability to play the flashy piano parts he’d become famous for were rendered as limp as his right hand. “It was like God took a light switch and turned it off,” Bayless says. “It was an incredibly dark period.”

But he moved forward. “I want to get back in the saddle,” he says. He started physical therapy and reclaimed some of the motor abilities he’d lost. That eventually included piano-playing, but with a single hand, the left. As Bayless worked to strengthen that hand, he came to realize that music is less a matter of technical prowess than it is a deeply felt expression of and intimate connection with the sound and everything around it.

Along the way of his recuperation path, Bayless discovered that he had Jewish heritage. That made sense to him—even as he’d played so many Baptist churches in his youth, he felt most comfortable at his rare synagogue appearances. “I knew it inside me deep somewhere,” he says.

He started embracing Jewish customs and then studied studying in earnest to convert to Judaism, including learning Hebrew. In a moving act of acceptance and support, his mother, a devout Baptist, crocheted several yarmulkes for him. He and Bruce eventually got married, with a rabbi participating. 

Sadly, the partner who took care of Bayless after his stroke was suffering his own serious health crisis: cancer. This time it was Bayless in the support role. But just five years after Bayless’s stroke, and shortly after the wedding, Franchini died. 

It was another dark time for Bayless. But just as he’d survived the previous one, he got “back in the saddle” for the trail to recovery from this latest tragedy.

Bayless reached the point where he was able to consider touring again, not as in the past, but in a new way, relying on his hard-won ability to cover both melody and accompaniment with a single hand. He headed back out on the road, putting his reclaimed talent for music together with his knack for showmanship and his storytelling ability—and having a very compelling story of rebirth and reinvention to tell the audiences on his tour stops.

These days, Bayless continues to tour, screening the documentary about his life of early growth, fame, and rebirth; adding some personal thoughts and recollections afterward; and then performing. Most of his crowds no doubt leaves as the Lehigh Valley audience did: moved, enlightened, and inspired.