HUNTINGTON - When Jesse Nolan was 2 years old in New Jersey, his dad Joe would go to work, and his mom, JoAnn, who was deaf, would turn off her hearing aids, open the cabinets, and let Jesse pull out the pots and pans and laugh and drum joyously like the Muppets' Animal.
Well played, mom, well played.
Fast-forward 30 years later, and Jesse Nolan is still making a joyful noise learning and teaching rhythms daily in his walk of life.
A new visiting assistant professor of music with the MU College of Arts and Media, Nolan is one of just more than 100 new hires at Marshall this fall, and chances are he's got one of the most "colorful" pasts.
The young educator and drummer has spent the past five years as a resident music director, drummer and percussionist with the world-famous Blue Man Group.
In fact, since 2011, Nolan has chalked up more than 400 performances with the North American touring cast of BMG - more than 250 gigs with the Chicago and Orlando casts, and an additional 150 dates with the avant-garde percussion group aboard Norwegian Epic Cruise Lines during a European tour of the Mediterranean.
While Nolan wouldn't trade those - or any of his other national Broadway tour experiences - for the world, with his wife Amy expecting their first child in November, he was praying for the right chance to exit the blurred lines of the road, to simplify their lives and to get back to where he once belonged - immersed in his first love of jazz.
It's for those reasons that Nolan, who was with fellow Marshall music professor Jeff Wolfe during his schooling at Indiana University, is diving back into the classroom at Marshall and hoping to be the kind of inspirational music instructor which he says he was blessed with.
"I have been fortunate to have always had amazing teachers no matter what stage I have been in. Elementary school, middle school, high school, camps, college - it has been this 33-year love affair with drumming that kind of started very organically. I was born, I learned to walk, then I learned to talk and then to drum. That was sort of the progression of things."
While his family pinballed back and forth twice between New Jersey and Illinois growing up, he said it was his time in high school in Naperville, Illinois, that got him fully immersed in music as a career option. A band director at that Illinois high school pushed him to sign up for everything, and he did - marching band, concert band and jazz band.
From then on he began looking at drumming as a career.
"Drumming - it's always my love but ... I realized how serious it could be as an art form. That forged the idea this could be a career - that people play music for a living, and write music for a living and teach music for a living," Nolan said. "I got to see the opportunity that was there for those who were willing to take it. I know I was fortunate to come from a family with means and go through a system of schools that had resources to create good music program. I took really good advantage of that," he said.
By the time he finished his junior year of high school, Nolan already had enough credits to graduate and had been accepted by Indiana University.
"Kind of from that moment I got to focus on music and knew I was going to college for music, everything I am doing is building to something," Nolan said. "I never looked at being in school for music as being in school but that every assignment, every project, every paper, you should be building something."
While at Indiana University's Jacobs School of Music, where he earned a bachelor's degree in music education and a master's in jazz studies, percussion, Nolan was also driving to Chicago every weekend and touring nationally with Second Hand Poet, an alt-country band.
"My mantra has been to say yes to everything ... if it fits in your schedule, say yes. And that started the busiest nine years of my life," he said. "My wife and I call that time between 2006 to now as our circus years."
That circus life got turned up a few notches after Nolan graduated and began teaching in the Chicago area, where opportunities came knocking in the classroom and on the stage.
It was when he was teaching junior high school in Illinois that he became a part-time drummer for the Chicago Blue Man Group shows playing between two and four shows a week.
"Some days I would work 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the school and would have to be at Blue Man Group at 2:45 p.m. I would play the 4, 7 and 10 p.m. shows on a Wednesday, finish at midnight, drive an hour home and get up at 5:30 a.m. and drive to work and do it all again. That was two years," Nolan said.
The part-time gig with the Blue Man Group led to an offer he couldn't refuse when the group asked him to be music director on a Norwegian Cruise Line Ship for a five-month stint with no promise of further work.
He quit his full-time teaching job and spent what he calls the best summer ever skirting around the Mediterranean working on the cruise ship with his wife by his side.
Two weeks into the tour, Blue Man asked him to be music director of a North American tour, a job which had him traveling between 40 and 45 weeks a year.
"The thing that is killer is the schedule," Nolan said of being on the road. He said sometimes the group would stay in a city for a week at a time, which let the performers get to know a city, but other times they were performing in 20 cities in six weeks. "That is when life hurts, and you wake up and are like, 'Where are we? I don't know, but there is a Waffle House across the street."'
It was during his stint as Blue Man Group's music director that he became acquainted with Marshall, as he came to the Marshall Music Department to do a music workshop when the group was here as part of the Marshall Artists Series in 2013.
He also brings to Marshall his work with educational tech company MashPlant, of which he is part owner and president. MashPlant specializes in building interactive online social communities for people with a shared interest, and he has used the program to allow students to upload recordings and have them viewed and critiqued by only class members, among other applications.
Nolan plans to use the program at Marshall to be interactive with both college and high school students and the greater community.