Close your eyes when John Bayless plays the piano and you will be enchanted. Beautiful melodies, both original and familiar, enriched by colorful harmonies, creating soundscapes of emotion and passion — it’s what he wants you to hear, and what he wants you to feel.

“Music to me, first and foremost, is emotion,” Bayless said. “It’s that indescribable part of our soul that you can’t put your finger on, but you know it’s there. It’s palpable, powerful and potent. I want to recreate that and bring that to the fore.”

Open your eyes and you’ll be even more amazed. Bayless is creating all that emotion with one hand. One of the most accomplished pianists and inventive musicians of his generation, with multiple albums on the Billboard crossover charts, Bayless, 64, lost use of his right hand 10 years ago upon suffering a stroke. After a period of recuperation, he’s returned to the stage with some of the most fulfilling and entertaining music you’ll ever hear.

Bayless will perform on June 24 as part of the finale concert for the Aloha Piano Festival, which starts this weekend with student and adult competitions and runs through the week with public masterclasses and private instruction for students. Founded by local piano professional Lisa Nakamichi 13 years ago, the festival brings internationally known performers and teachers to Hawaii to give lessons and performances.

FOR BAYLESS, the stroke was one of many obstacles he’s had to overcome. He grew up in Borger, a small town in the Texas oil patch where most of his schoolmates were interested in things like football and “everything I wasn’t.”

His mother sang with the town’s music organizations and in church, and he remembers crawling under the family piano listening to her and her accompanist work through songs for her next show.

His mother made sure that he learned music the right way. It was not an easy task, since the preternaturally talented youth could play almost anything he heard by ear.

“She really had a tough time teaching me how to read music,” he said. “It took me three years to learn how to read music, but she said, ‘If it’s the last thing I do. …”

From there, he progressed to playing at high school graduations as a sixth-grader and other events. By then, the precocious youngster was already blending classical with pop, finding both appreciation and criticism when he performed his arrangement of “Hey Jude” in church.

His excuse that “It’s my special ministry” didn’t fly too well with the church elders, but Bayless kept doing it, one time finding himself improvising on a familiar but unknown tune that got stuck in his head.

“My mother was in the choir, and I looked up at her to get her approval, as we all do, and she had the most horrified look on her face,” Bayless said. “She knew what I was playing, but I didn’t know what I was playing — it was ‘The House of the Rising Sun.’”

Small as Borger was, it had a lively music scene, which generated enough support to send him to Aspen Music Festival’s school program as a teenager. His coach there was the legendary Juilliard teacher Adele Marcus, who wanted Bayless to come to New York immediately to study at Juilliard’s pre-college program. A congenital kidney condition kept him in Texas for two more years before he went off to New York.

Bayless would go on to study musical theater with Leonard Bernstein, Arthur Laurents and other luminaries of New York’s theater scene, and perform with major orchestras and in major music halls.

He created a number of top-selling albums, with his 1984 work “Bach Meets the Beatles: Variations in the Style of Bach” (1984) named one of the top 10 Classical Crossover albums in Billboard Magazine and his “The Puccini Album – Arias for the Piano” (1993) sitting at No. 1 on the crossover charts for 18 weeks.

One night in 2008, during a period when was extremely “busy and hectic” and he hadn’t been taking care of himself, Bayless awoke from a “really, really evil, horrific dream” and, after falling asleep again briefly, found himself breathing heavily and unable to feel his right side. A trip to the hospital revealed the stroke, and while he recovered his ability to speak soon enough, the loss of his right hand was permanent.

“It was so traumatic,” he said. “Having a right arm and a right hand, the beautiful gifts that God gave me to do what I wanted, to not being able to do anything – what was this?”

His recovery was as much spiritual as it was physical. Bayless began to study Judaism – he has Jewish ancestors, he said, but can’t name any – finding solace in its teachings. He’s since taken Hebrew lessons, and was bar mitzvahed last year. “Talk about an about-face, from the son of Southern Baptists,” he said with a laugh. “It was in my soul. It was something that was there.”

Returning to the piano was no simple task, especially considering the occasion. Bayless had been avoiding the piano when he was asked to play at the memorial for Henry Steinway, scion of the famous piano-building family. “I literally heard Henry’s voice in my head, saying, ‘Get on with it. You can’t just fake out like this, get on with it,’” Bayless said.

COMING BACK to piano required an even deeper understanding of technique and musicality than he already had. “Sometimes the thumb becomes the pinky, and sometimes the pinky becomes the thumb,” he said. Sometimes “the thumb becomes the singer, the leader. It’s so funny because the way I was trained, and most people were taught to keep the left-hand thumb quiet, because it’s clumsy and heavy, and now it’s taking center stage.

“What it’s done is it’s forced me to simplify. While I was doing the Puccini Album, Bach and Beatles, all of those records – there’s thousands of notes there, and I didn’t think anything about it. … but you can only do so much with five fingers. So it’s forced me to distill the ideas and the important things in the music, as opposed to being all over the place. I can still play a lot of notes, but this has forced me to be simpler.”

For the Aloha Piano Festival, Bayless will appear in two free public masterclasses, give private lessons and perform in the June 24 finale concert, playing some of his solo works and joining other piano professionals in his three-piano arrangement of Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.”

Other guest artists at the Festival are Jon Nakamatsu, an island favorite who won the 1997 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, and Ory Shihor, an Israeli-­born musician who tours internationally and teaches at the Colburn Conservatory of Music in Los Angeles.