My special guest for this episode is pianist John Bayless, whose story is featured in the incredible documentary Left Alone Rhapsody: The Musical Memoir of Pianist John Bayless. In our conversation, John reflects on life before and after his stroke. Post-stroke, John's resilience shines through as he embarks on a remarkable path of self-recovery and discovery. Teaching himself to play with just his left hand, he defied the odds and embraced a new chapter. John's story and music make this episode a must-listen, just as the documentary is a must-watch.
John Bayless is an internationally renowned concert pianist, composer, improviser, and prolific recording artist. A protégé of Leonard Bernstein and a Yamaha artist, John is a crossover artist known for how he blends classical training and piano technique with popular music in imaginative improvisations. Despite a debilitating stroke halting his illustrious 30-year career, John refused to surrender. Instead, he embarked on a second act, teaching himself to play with just his left hand. This story is brilliantly shared in Stewart Schulman's documentary Left Alone Rhapsody: The Musical Memoir of Pianist John Bayless.
Left Alone Rhapsody: The Musical Memoir of Pianist John Bayless
The John Bayless Fund for Brain Research
Music featured in the episode:
[00:00:00] John: All my life, I've been interested in showing off and being entertaining, you know. My piano teacher, when I was 15 years old in Amarillo, Texas said, I can always count on Johnny to close a recital out for me.
[00:00:15] I knew what to do, but now it's different and now it speaks on another level and I don't think I could do that if I hadn't had a stroke, if I hadn't had some sort of impairment that took away all of that glitter, all of that gloss.
[00:00:40] Carole: Welcome to Wisdom Shared, where people on the front lines are the experts and where connection inspires change. I am your host, Carole Blueweiss. And today I have as my special guest, John Bayless. At age 25, John was Leonard Bernstein's protégé. He performed all over the world, composed, and now teaches the next generation.
[00:01:04] John's childhood was shadowed by a congenital disability that may have actually been a blessing in disguise. He learned resilience. After 30 years of playing the piano, John had a major stroke at the age of 54 that interrupted his career. Instead of focusing on what he couldn't do, which was use two hands to play the piano, he taught himself how to play both melody and chords with his left hand.
[00:01:29] His musical legacy and his comeback are the subject of an award-winning feature documentary called Left Alone Rhapsody: The Musical Memoir of Pianist John Bayless, written, directed, and produced by filmmaker Stewart Schulman. More information on this remarkable film and where you can see it can be found in the show notes. Consider this interview a prelude.
[00:01:57] Welcome to Wisdom Shared, John.
[00:02:00] John: I love the title, Wisdom Shared. Makes me sound important or smart.
[00:02:06] Carole: Well, I think you are just a little bit.
[00:02:09] John: Thank you. Thank you for having me.
[00:02:13] Carole: It's an honor to have you. I want to have my audience get to know you, so I will start by asking you, what is your profession?
[00:02:24] John: My profession is I'm a musician. A musician encompasses a lot of things. I'm a pianist. I'm a composer, recording artist, teacher, coach.
[00:02:36] Carole: You've recently participated in a documentary that is absolutely fabulous. I learned a lot about you just from the film. So it gave me a lot to be curious about. If we were to start at the beginning, I noticed that, I think it was mostly at the beginning of the film. Stewart, who's the writer, producer, director, spoke about your childhood and how your musical talents actually sprung forward then.
[00:03:00] John: When I was, four, I would go to church and I would hear the hymns, and I would play on the back of the pew in front of me, like the lady, the organist or the pianist, you know, and imitate her. And after the service was over, I'd go to the piano and push the lady off.
[00:03:18] I was like this little push. I'd say, get over Dorothy, let me play it. And I'd play the hymns. And I would play them, and that was my first, I loved it because, first of all, people applauded. I knew they had liked it immediately. I knew they responded, they reacted in some way.
[00:03:43] My mother is a musician. She said, it's okay that you play everything by ear. But she said, you have to learn to read music. If you don't read music, you'll never be any better than you are right now at four. Come on, you have to read music. So she started to teach me and I was kind of a losing case and took her three years. E, G, B, D, teaching me how to read.
[00:04:11] And I did, I learned, obviously. Because you have to know how to read to go to Juilliard, which ultimately I did. Anyway, that was my musical start, was the church, hearing things. I had two influences on television during that period, during the 60s, 70s. Liberace and Bernstein, with the Young People's Concerts.
[00:04:37] They were my idols. It wasn't a quarterback from some stupid Dallas Cowboys or something. I lived in this little town, which was like 15, 000 people in the Texas panhandle where football and sports are supreme, and if you don't do that, you're weird. And you know, all of these kind of things, and so anyway, I had that to deal with.
[00:05:00] But also, my childhood was fraught, in a way, simply with difficulties, because I had kidney and bladder issues to deal with, and I had eight major operations by the time I was 14. I lived for eight years with a tube that drained my bladder into a bag. And when I went to school, I didn't go to the boys bathroom. I went to the principal's bathroom, which made me feel very special. But I had that to deal with at the same time of dealing with being a prodigy in music and revered and everything like that.
[00:05:39] Carole: Going back to that time, do you think that that influenced you in terms of your ability to be so talented, if that even makes any sense? I mean, I don't know that much about how a prodigy becomes a prodigy, but clearly you have to have passion for the music and you have to have been given the instrument to play it on. And your environment has to be right and your soul has to be ready.
[00:06:03] John: All of those, 1,2,3,4, instrument, the environment, those categories, I was very blessed because my mother was my first teacher. She recognized I had an incredible talent. She wanted me to study, she wanted me to learn, and she did her devil best to get the best people for me all through my life. And also with the physical problem. And my father, I mean, I can't imagine what I would be if I didn't have the parents I had, because my parents supported everything.
[00:06:34] My parents supported not only the musical training, but the medical. I mean, it was extensive with these different operations and all these different things and, you know, in how am I going to grow up? How am I going to be in society? And you live in a small, isolated place. It's in the world. It's slightly challenging,
[00:06:58] Carole: I want to hear more about those challenges. do you remember way back when?
[00:07:02] John: I was born with a congenital anomaly in the urinary tract and system. it's not such an obvious thing that my right side is affected. I was born I had no muscle on my right side of my body. It was like, not there. It was just non-existent. It didn't develop. And my right kidney was, it works now, but it didn't work then. It colored everything. It colored my relationship with my brothers. It colored my relationship with my sister. And, you know, here I am this prodigy and playing and being a wunderkind and then at the same time having this malady, this physical problem. It was hard to find the balance, but I think the spirit ofgoing forth and evolving, it's always been there. And I do think, like the doctor said, if I didn't have music, I wouldn't have made it. As I said, I lived with a tube out my side for eight years, it drained into a bag on my leg, that was my reality. I didn't go to gym, I didn't play with the other kids.
[00:08:24] Carole: Feeling different, most people don't have even one of those things, but you had so many things that whether it was physically or whether it was society or whether it was religious, you had like a few whammies of, I'm not like everyone else. In the sense that life just comes along easily and you accept everything.
[00:08:44] John: Can you imagine?
[00:08:45] Carole: Do you remember how you felt being different than other kids?
[00:08:49] John: Oh, that's not too difficult. I felt, I knew I was different. I wasn't like other boys. I didn't like to play baseball. I didn't like to run, fortunately, because of my physical problem. How I dealt with the growing up during that period is, the piano became my voice, it became my instrument, like, it became how I expressed myself.
[00:09:18] Like when I said to you just a while ago, that after I played the hymn, I would get applause. Well, that was totally affirming to me, and it sparked the flame to go on and do more. And my classmates, they understood it, and I had grown up there, and by the time I was in high school, this is a wild story. You're gonna love this.
[00:09:44] So, there's an organization in high school called Key Club, and it's a division of the Kiwanis. It's a men's service organization, but Key Club is the high school boys group. So, I was asked to be a member of Key Club, and I thought, well, that's very good. That's really nice. So if you can imagine, when we had our Key Club meetings an hour, 6:30 to 7:30, and then we go to school.
[00:10:17] Well, during this period, I had several major things that I had to play at. So if you can imagine in a small little ballroom in a hotel in Borger, Texas, with 35 football players, all cute, all gorgeous, you know, sweet, lovely, and I'm sitting in the piano. Playing, you know, the Waldstein Sonata, the first moment at 6:30 in the morning on a Wednesday.
[00:10:45] I mean, how the hell did you deal with that? But they did. And, the Key Club had a big statewide or regional competition and they all wanted me to play in it, so we went on a bus to Houston one weekend and I played the Fantasy Impromptu of Chopin, and I won the competition, but I must tell you, during the finals, they put the piano up on the stage.
[00:11:14] Okay, it wasn't so great, but the chairs, they had those chairs that they're in dining rooms in hotels that they stack on each other and can make it taller. Well, I needed it a little taller. So, they put another chair on it. And so I'm playing, playing, the chair started to slide. And I'm sitting and I'm playing in front of like a thousand high school guys from Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico. Oh God, what did I do so wrong to deserve this? But it was okay. I didn't fall, nothing happened.
[00:12:03] Carole: One thing I definitely would love to hear is, how a person like yourself grows up in a small town of Texas, like you said, I don't know what religion you were brought up in, but I do know what religion you are now. So I just wonder if you could talk a little bit about that.
[00:12:18] John: Part one, I was raised as Southern Baptist. And if you don't know, , it's like Orthodox Judaism. I mean, it's, you can't do this, you can't do that. You know, it's very strict. And by the time I was 15, I was the organist in the church. And I was the youngest church organist in the whole state of Texas.
[00:12:44] And God knows how many Southern Baptist churches there are in Texas, but there are hundreds. That became a venue for me to play, expose my music, perform, praise God. And then age 14, 15, 16, around there, I don't know why, but I got very interested in Judaism. And for your listeners, if they don't know where I grew up, Jewish people in the Texas panhandle are few and far between. I mean, I think we had eight families in my whole town. My father was an automobile dealer, Ford's and Lincoln Mercury's, and he dealt with everybody and he was like the mayor.
[00:13:31] And I knew them and they had jewelry stores and, you know, shops and I was attracted to something about their being Jewish. And I have thought about it since then. I didn't feel judged with my Jewish friends. They'd come and pick me up at my house on a Friday night, and about 4:00, 4:30, we'd go to eat somewhere, you know, have a little dinner, and then go to Temple. I walked into the temple and I remember this man, he gave me a yarmulke. And it was like I felt at home. I felt, I don't know what, but it was so thick and strong that it was just amazing.
[00:14:19] Carole: Can you play something that expresses that feeling?
[00:14:32] John: I mean, I remember Hanna Bloom singing I mean, to the top of her lungs. She was an operatic singer. And I mean, it was like, whoa. It was great. I loved it. And then, and then we had the oneg shabbat after temple that we had cookies and cakes and dah da da, and then make the drive back to Borger, Texas. And I would get like a Jewish education on the way back from Dan Berg or Leslie Kaiser or Sid Levenstein, whatever. And they would talk to me.
[00:15:04] So it's it's always been a part of my DNA. I finally, converted to Judaism. Your listeners are probably thinking, well, how did his parents deal with? My parents dealt with it, they just did, they were incredibly special in their ability to accept. Doesn't mean that it was always easy. They had to swallow a bitter pill that I was gay too. My dad said to one of his friends, I heard him. I couldn't believe it. My dad says, well, Johnny, he's a Jew. My Dan is Episcopal Palian or something like that. Jim Fred is a born again. And I don't know what Leanne is.
[00:15:46] Carole: Wait, those are your brothers and sisters?
[00:15:49] John: Yes.
[00:15:51] Carole: You mentioned that you were, are gay. And that you felt like you belong to the Jewish faith more than the faith that you were, born into. Do you think that's connected in any way? Is there any connection there?
[00:16:07] John: Yes, yes, you know why? Because they're both are to be gay and to be Jewish, they're minorities. They're minorities. And I've actually thought about this, Carole, but that one of the reasons I felt so comfortable there was that I didn't feel judged.
[00:16:33] It's not that I went and I said to Dan Berg or Al Levine, hey, I'm gay, you know? What I felt internally and spiritually, I didn't feel judged. I didn't feel like that was a problem. Where in the Baptist church, that's a problem. Here I am, 15 years old, smartass, playing organ for church, showing off and falling in love with the boys in the choir. And I know that if all the women and all they knew, oh, Johnny's he's so holy. Bull. I mean, that's like, it's like this was, this amazing dichotomy of, hello? I don't understand this, but I've come to believe that a lot of the assimilation and the similar experience of being Jewish, being gay, this, they're very close.
[00:17:34] For me, they were. I didn't feel judged. There was such a sympathetic vibration, a sympathetic chord in my being that went off when I was with my Jewish friends. It was like, you know, it was, it was amazing. And so ultimately, obviously I became Jewish.
[00:17:56] Carole: Can you play something how you're feeling right now talking about this?
[00:18:04] John: You are an evil woman.
[00:18:36] Carole: What if I'm a kid I come up to, say like, hey, Mr. Bayless, why are you using only one arm?
[00:18:43] John: Well, if I had my druthers, I wouldn't. But in 2008, I had a stroke and it took out my whole right side. I look at my right hand I'm like, where the hell are you? You've had enough rest. Get on with it. I don't know. I mean, the things in the brain that the stroke damaged this part of my body. So if I wanted to express myself, communicate with people like I did as a child, I had to learn how to play with one hand. I had to learn how to make it work.
[00:19:21] Since 2008, I've been doing that, and I have my own show, and I've got this documentary, and I'm playing all over the place, that's what's happening.
[00:19:32] Carole: What's your next dream?
[00:19:34] John: My next dream, it's not so far away. To play with one hand, you have five fingers. With two hands you have ten. Okay, you have a lot more options with 10 than you do with five. With five, you have to play the melody, the harmony, create the mood, the whole thing.
[00:19:54] And it's taken a few years to figure out how to reinvent and use just my left hand. My dream would be to walk on stage and I'm almost there, be as comfortable playing with one hand as I did with two. Because I was, you know, I was wild. I was a showman. I did all of this stuff.
[00:20:19] You know, one of the things, Carole, that I was so grateful for after my stroke, and I really didn't realize it before, was my recordings. I have 12, 15 recordings that recorded what I did with two hands. I thought, yeah, it's good. I liked it.
[00:20:53] Satisfied me, but I didn't realize how good it was. When I say I want to walk out on stage and play and be as comfortable as I did with two hands, as with one hand. I want to have the confidence and the knowledge of knowing that I did that, that I can do it.
[00:21:16] Carole: You've come a long way, I imagine, from the day you had the stroke to now.
[00:21:22] John: Oh my God. I couldn't walk. I can walk. I need to walk more. You know, all my life, I've been, gotta practice. I've gotta practice four hours and get the G major just get it clean and get it. Play the Chopin and play the Bach. And then, I've got it and I'm up at 6:00 in the morning practicing when I'm in high school and all this discipline and all of this stuff going on, and it's like, now I'm having to do the same damn thing, but only with one hand.
[00:22:00] And it's like, I'm tired. You know, I'm, that's the frustration that I have. A lot of people think, oh, he plays the piano. The operative word is play. Yeah, but you've got to know what you're doing to play the piano. And, it takes work. It takes work.
[00:22:21] Carole: One of my favorite parts in the film was when you asked the audience to play a piece of music in a style that wasn't originally intended for that music.
[00:22:32] John: Like play Jingle Bells in the style of Stravinsky or Take Five in the style of Bach or anything.
[00:22:39] Carole: How did you come up with that? Like, how did, I mean, that was unbelievable.
[00:22:44] John: I actually didn't come up with it. I mean, a friend of mine named Roger Englander was a director, very well Emmy-award winning director. He directed all of the Young People's Concerts of Bernstein and Horowitz on television and all of these great shows. He was very close to me.
[00:23:04] We were very good friends. He had some sense that I could do that. He encouraged me and in fact encouraged me so much to such an extent that a concert in Newport, Rhode Island, in July of 1982, they asked me write a piece celebrating their past six presidents, Jane Pickens Hoving, Mrs. John Nicholas Brown of Brown University, Countess Zippori, who was Gloria Vanderbilt's aunt and Tony Coleman. I mean, obviously the final lady was a born-again Christian, Betty Reid. So I wrote a composer's piece for 13 instruments and piano, and I conducted it from the piano. The second half of the concert was me doing my schtick with taking suggestions from the audience and playing.
[00:24:06] I hadn't really ever done that in public, with the stakes are that high, but I had been composing this piece for two months and so immersed in it and everything that I didn't think about it. And there was one improv that night that Roger had recorded.
[00:24:29] And the audience members said, play chopsticks as you did from the cradle, you know. And people were laughing and they were, you know, screaming and it was so fun, and Roger said to me the next day, he said, you know what, that's going to make you some money one of these days. So that's kind of where it started. Thank God, I had a hook.
[00:25:02] Carole: What was it like to feel accepted or I guess the word is be a protégé of a man like Leonard Bernstein?
[00:25:10] John: I could kind of die and go to heaven already. I mean, it's, we have the same birthday, August the 25th. And Roger, who I just spoken about, who produced and directed all of his Young People's Concerts on TV, introduced me to Lenny on our birthday, 25th of August. He always respected my music making. I had to make some money, so I took a job at the Maestro Cafe across the street from Lincoln Center, I know, I remember the night Candide at the City Opera. My thing I wanted to do was to play the Overture to Candide. I learned it and I played it that damn thing, and Lenny came in that night, and I was playing the overture, and it was incredible. It was just a great, great moment.
[00:26:15] Carole: In the film, I got this sense over and over again that certain people in your life helped you to find your own, I would say your own voice, but of course I don't mean your own voice, but your own inner, original self, to give you the courage or the confidence. I don't know how that works with music, but I know people in general in life, they're kind of hoping to have someone help them find their true essence. So it sounds like you had a few people that, as brilliant as you were starting at age four, you also had other people encouraging you and coaching you.
[00:26:54] John: I was asked this question who do you listen to now? What concerts do you go to now that are important? It sounds so jaded, but I don't. I mean, I heard the best. I've heard Bernstein. I've heard Horowitz, Rubinstein in person. I met them. Schulte, Van Cliburn, fellow Texan. It's a different period. It's not the same as it was.
[00:27:21] Carole: And the hearing it recorded versus live.
[00:27:23] John: And right, exactly. We didn't have YouTube, nothing like that. So I was dependent on the local record store, The Music Box, was what it was. A little shop in Borger, Texas. And Mrs. Lozier would order a few classical, but a lot of country western and I would go in and I would comb those bins of classical music to see what I wanted to buy. I remember that. I remember this, there was this Young People's Concert that Lenny did, talking about Beethoven Fifth.
[00:28:04] Right? And he talks about it and I know that Mrs. Lozier had a Beethoven Bernstein, New York Philharmonic, Beethoven Fifth Symphony in the bin and a bonus 45 of Bernstein talking about it. So I had to have that record. So I knew it was 5 dollars and 49 cents because that's what she priced them at. Did I have $5.49? No. So, I'm at church on Sunday night, and this lady, very sweet woman, she'd always wanted me to arrange a hymn for her. I went up to her, and I said, Mrs. Hall, I'll do that hymn for you, arrange it for you, but it's gonna cost you $5.49.
[00:28:51] Carole: I love that.
[00:28:53] John: She goes, it is? I said, yes, ma'am. She gave me the five. So, I made my first deal in church and on a Sunday. So.
[00:29:03] Carole: What haven't I asked you that you wish I would ask you? Is there anything that comes to mind for you?
[00:29:08] John: I'd like to ask, you know, I mean, what can I do? I play the piano. I have one hand, you know, I'm not a superstar, like, whatever, and I'm trying to think what, in some way that can make this world better. I mean, it's a mess, we're in a mess and I'm just really tortured, you know, cause I know I can do something and if I can do something about making people feel something, they want to, they feel emotion or they feel hope or they feel, you know, that's great. And that's what I want to do, that's what I want to do, and do it the best way possible.
[00:29:49] And you know the interesting thing about this, Carole? The interesting thing about it is, I always felt that there would be a way that I would do that, but I couldn't do it with two hands. I could not, I could not do it the same way.
[00:30:08] Carole: Tell me more. I don't understand.
[00:30:09] John: Because now, with playing with one hand and incorporating all of that juice inside me, that music and that spirit and that vigor. It has to come out of here. So how do I do that? Well, I can't do as much. I can't play all the notes. It's simpler. It's more heartfelt. It's more to the essence of what the piece is. It's more melodic. It forces me to find, to really get the essence of what the song is about. And because all my life I've been interested in showing off and being, you know, flamboyant, not flamboyant, but being entertaining, you know, my piano teacher, when I was 15 years old in Amarillo, Texas said, I can always count on Johnny to close a show out, to close a recital out for me.
[00:31:13] I knew what to do but now it's different and now it speaks on another level. Now it speaks on another level and I don't think I could do that if I hadn't had a stroke, if I hadn't had some sort of impairment that took away all of that glitter, all of that gloss, all of that stuff. And so what I want to do is to refine that and make it as honest and as true, sincere as possible.
[00:31:49] Carole: I wonder, I mean, this might not be a fair question cause it's kind of a cliche question, but I know you'll answer it honestly do you think your illness as a child gave you some of that? Inner spiritual or I don't know what the word is.
[00:32:03] John: Definitely, definitely, definitely, definitely, definitely.
[00:32:06] Carole: So, it's fair to ask that question.
[00:32:08] John: It's totally fair to ask that question.
[00:32:11] Carole: Can you talk a little bit to that? Because I think people like don't necessarily realize that at the time. I'm guessing you didn't either, but you see in retrospect how something that felt so horrible could end up being such a good thing.
[00:32:25] John: Well, I didn't always feel accepted, but what I did, there was this inner self, an inner sense of myself, I knew something, maybe not, couldn't put a name on it, a label on it, but I knew something. And it's just like with being Jewish, I didn't know what that meant, but I knew that there was something there.
[00:32:44] Yesterday, I had a Hebrew lesson and my teacher, Gail Jacobs, and she said, I'm going to share something with you that the rabbi talked about this last week. She said, you know what, Ruach Elohim, and I said, well, I know Ruach is spirit and Elohim is God, the spirit of God. She said, I thought about this with you.
[00:33:05] She said, how can you explain at four years old, climbing onto the piano, playing something in the key that it's written in, the right notes? That's the Spirit of God. That's the creative spirit. That's the Spirit of God. I mean, it was so wild I somehow knew that when I was a kid, I knew it, I knew I couldn't put a name to it, I couldn't put a definition to it, I couldn't put a label on it, but I knew that it was, I knew that there was something there. And, my doctor in Texas said that he, he said that if Johnny didn't have music, he would probably be dead. It saved me, it's always saved me.
[00:33:52] John: I don't know how to manifest this. I've always wanted to go to a children's hospital or, what would be like to play, you know, I see these St. Jude commercials on TV and breaks my heart. I can't stand it. I'd love to do that. I love to experience them, would love to do that. I
[00:34:20] Carole: I love that idea. I think it's going to happen. Thank you, John.
[00:35:08] John: You're welcome. It's what I do, man. Hope it was okay.
[00:35:17] Stewart: He debuted Carnegie Hall playing Rhapsody in Blue with two hands. And during the course of his reinvention, he started rewriting, reorchestrating Rhapsody in Blue for six hands. And then we discussed as we were creating the show, do you think you would be able to play Rhapsody in Blue with one hand as your finale? And he said, sure, you know, whatever. And of course, you know, easier said than done.
[00:35:41] You go play Rhapsody in Blue with two hands after you've studied for 20 years and see if that's possible. Now play it with one hand. But he did. And that gave me the Left Alone Rhapsody. And then it has other connotations. If you see the film, what left alone means.
[00:35:55] Carole: That was Stewart Schulman, the director, producer, and writer of the award-winning feature documentary Left Alone Rhapsody: The Musical Memoir of Pianist John Bayless. And if you are lucky enough to be in New York this April, the film will be screened at the ReelAbilities Film Festival, the largest disability film festival in the country. Check out the show notes for more details.
[00:36:16] On the next episode of Wisdom Shared, Stewart Schulman will be my special guest and we will hear his personal journey making this amazing film. You don't want to miss this conversation.
[00:36:26] Thank you so much for listening to Wisdom Shared. If you enjoyed this episode, please be sure to check out all the other episodes. Go to caroleblueweiss.com or wherever you listen to podcasts. If you like what you're hearing on Wisdom Shared, please spread the word and share this podcast with your friends. Leave a review and subscribe so you can receive wisdom every month. Thanks for listening.