A Versatile Nightclub Pianist Finds the Key to Contentment

It’s a recent Monday night and Karen Hernandez is sitting at the piano in Alfonse’s in Toluca Lake, wooing the crowd with a slow, soulful version of “Georgia on My Mind.” She plays with her eyes closed and a smile on her lips and, as the rhythm builds, she moves with it, lifting first her left shoulder, then her right, leaning forward, then back, transported. The audience is right there with her, and when the number is finished, rousing applause erupts.

Creating this sort of happy happening, a scene that’s been repeated night after night in a number of Valley clubs since 1975, has become a way of life for Karen Hernandez. Though by no means merely a cocktail pianist, Hernandez works a cocktail pianist’s schedule, banging out anything from “Invitation” to original Latin-based tunes six nights a week.

Her current engagements are at Alfonse’s, where she works Mondays and Tuesdays (with bassist Ernie McDaniel and drummer Earl Palmer, with percussionist Jerry Steinholtz added Tuesdays), and Monteleone’s West in Encino, where she can be heard Wednesdays through Saturdays, accompanied by McDaniel and drummer Mel Lee.

‘Feeling Young’

It’s a rigorous way to make a living but one that certainly has its appeal for red-haired, vivacious Hernandez. “I love working six nights,” she said during a conversation in the Burbank home she shares with four of her five children. “I like being out, being with people, getting an audience going. Music keeps me feeling young.”

In one way or another, Hernandez has been playing clubs since she was a child growing up in Salt Lake City. There, she’d play the piano at home late at night, often past midnight. “I’d play with my eyes closed, thinking I was working in a nightclub.” So you could say that what she’s doing today is a continuing dream come true.

Hernandez, who says she’s in her 40s, doesn’t always get the spotlight. Often, she has to back singers, whose repertoires range from popular standards and Top 40 to contemporary jazz and bluesy, gospel numbers. The variety is fine, she said. Working with an unprepared vocalist is not.

“If a singer doesn’t know what they want to do, how they want their material to sound, then we have to rehearse, which I don’t much like to do,” she said. “But if a singer knows what they want to do, comes in with good arrangements, then we can do it cold. We don’t need to run over anything.”

If Hernandez has a favorite solo style, it’s the mixture of blues, jazz and gospel that she first heard from pianists like Les McCann and Gene Harris, and from singers such as Ray Charles and Lou Rawls. “I’m sort of straight ahead, cookin’ and bluesy,” was her description. “I like to play real pretty ballads with bluesy feeling. And I love to get into the gospel thing. A tune like ‘Georgia’ lends itself to that.”

The pianist feels that simple chords and simple rhythms are at the center of the gospel approach. But really, to understand the form, you have to “hang out in the Baptist church to know what it means,” said Hernandez, who, though a Mormon, also used to attend Baptist services while living in Ogden, Utah. “I loved the music,” she said with a smile.

Hernandez developed her style, and her poise, while working at Freddie Jett’s Pied Piper, a Los Angeles club with a black clientele, in the late ‘60s. “At first, the audience looked at me a little like ‘What makes her think she can start working here?’ I felt the pressure of being a girl, white and from Utah,” she recalled.

Simplicity Over Flash

At first, Hernandez hated to go to work, but eventually she found that the pressure was making her strong, because she had to prove herself. In Salt Lake City, she was quickly accepted. Now, she was playing numbers and sometimes getting no applause. “I felt I had to start doing things that would move audiences, like getting a rhythmic pattern going and staying in it until it builds and builds and builds,” she said.

The style worked then, and it works now, because Hernandez emphasizes simplicity over flash, rousing, energized rhythms over jack-rabbit lines. “My strong points are establishing rhythms and feelings,” she said, “getting that pulse going. I can’t scare anybody with my technique, that’s for sure, but I think I can put over feeling as good as anybody.”

Hernandez said she was born knowing how to play the piano, and could pick out tunes, complete with chords, from the beginning. “I didn’t have to pick it out with one finger; I could go over to the keyboard and go (makes her hands ready to play chords) ‘bomp.’ ”

A professional at age 9, Hernandez began her career backing singers in church programs and playing for tap dancers. The experience helped her become a good listener, an essential skill for an accompanist. Some of the knowns and lesser-knowns she’s worked with over the years include O.C. Smith, Ernie Andrews, Jimmy Spencer, Herb Jeffries, Esther Philips, Jean Diamond, Jesse Davis, Jimmy Witherspoon, Johnny Hartman and Lorez Alexandria.

Hernandez, who had long wanted to move to California from Salt Lake City, came here in 1968. But it took some encouragement, in the form of Gene Harris, then pianist with the popular Three Sounds group, for her to make the switch. “I didn’t think I could make it here, but Gene came through and heard me and said, ‘Oh, you’d do fine. Come on down,’ ” she said.

The pianist still has some goals that have not been met, like doing a concert or making a big-selling album, and that kind of bothers her. She pondered the reasons why she’s not a bigger success:

“Sometimes I think it’s because I didn’t hang out, like I wasn’t political, that I always got off the gig and came home to my husband and kids. But I wanted to do that, because keeping a nice home for my kids is the most important thing to me.” (Hernandez, once divorced, lost her second husband, Raul Cervantes, in an auto accident in 1984.)

“I don’t know if it’s because I’m a girl,” she continued. “Like, guys that I would be playing with would get called for sessions and I wouldn’t. I don’t think it’s because they didn’t like the way I played, ‘cause I’m always getting compliments.”

If Hernandez--who spends some of her days doing volunteer work for the homeless at Burbank Temporary Aid--had to keep up the night-in, night-out grind the rest of her life, she thinks it would be OK.

“The music has kept my kids going, made my house payments, put bread on the table,” she said. “I have to be thankful I have a job, and though I might not make a lot, there’s still a lot of guys that would like to have my job. If I start complaining, I might not have it.”

Stewart writes regularly for Calendar.