The Tom Nolan Band shakes it off

by Gavin Heaney
07/31/2025

The stage is packed with performers and the sound spills out onto the dance floor. A tambourine shakes, horns blaze, a bass slides, the guitar wails and drums dazzle as the singer moans deep from under his fedora. This is a movement urging you to dance like no one is watching. It’s the joyous blunt force of a large musical ensemble fervently intent on one thing and one thing only: to help you forget yourself a while, and have some soul fun. 

“We recognize the need for people to dance, shake off their blues and remember what it's like to really cut loose,” said Tom Nolan, singer and leader of The Tom Nolan Band. “Our whole goal is to get people dancing and to make them have fun. That’s our total operating premise. We want to remind people of what it's like when they are free.” The TNB lets freedom ring, belting out Aretha Franklin’s soulful plea in “Think”, urging you to get down and let it all hang out. The band is a ten-piece rhythm and blues review covering 60s Motown to present-day artists, as well as Nolan’s original material with founding band members, writing partner and guitarist David Hoyt and tenor saxophonist Victor Cisneros. The three started the band 35 years ago in a garage in Culver City. Nolan, who is originally from Indianapolis, was steeped in 60s soul music and rock ‘n’ roll.

“Our whole goal is to get people dancing and to make them have fun. That’s our total operating premise.”

 “I was very lucky as a kid to get to see James Brown, The Temptations, Sam and Dave, Aretha Franklin and Wilson Pickett,” Nolan said. “I was completely taken with that music from very early on. It started off with Elvis, Fats Domino, Chuck Berry and Ray Charles when I was even younger. I picked up the harmonica after I first heard Mick Jagger play ‘Not Fade Away’ and that was the beginning of a whole different trajectory into the blues. I was very fortunate as a young person to get to see the Beatles on tour, The Rolling Stones and Janis Joplin. When I first started putting a band together and writing songs, I wanted to emulate my heroes and bring along that spirit of just joy.”

Like the third Blues Brother, Nolan is on a “mission from God,” and that mission is a total immersion in the music, a baptism in the blues and a revival of vitality by surrendering to the sound. He is in search of that same surrender and release onstage. He is spreading the gospel of the groove.

“When you give up your ego and you focus on the experience with your fellow musicians and the audience, you go places you never expected,” he said. “I've been blessed to be surrounded by super musicians. Everybody in my band is first and foremost a great person and secondly, a fabulous player so for us it's always like coming back home. When we see each other, we know we're gonna have a good time and we know the crowd is gonna go nuts and that's that.”

The founding trio are backed by Eric Meeks on drums, David Brown on bass, keyboardist John Gulack, Jeff Jarvis and Jose Arellano on trumpet and trombone, with Yolande Howard and Caitlin Tortoricci on vocals. The band also features Nolan’s son Jesse Nolan on guitar. They are indeed a family band, delighting young and old with their collective concert experience.

”It's really fun when the crowd has multigenerational representation. The music we do is in people's DNA. I’m a great believer that the biggest gift America has given to the world is music and we want to represent and celebrate it,” Nolan said. “I definitely think of myself as a musicologist and somebody who's preserving the tradition.” Representing rhythm and blues from root to fruit is what it’s all about for this soul man. Nolan prides himself on the great diversity of artists the band covers.

“The women sing everybody from Etta James, Chaka Khan, The Pointer Sisters to Whitney Houston and even Taylor Swift. We’ve done a really cool version of ‘Shake It Off’ with horns that makes it sound like an R&B tune,” he said. “ Then I’m doing everything from Sam and Dave, Otis Redding to Eddie Floyd. I think it's really important to remember that that's the roots. Nobody would be doing what they're doing today if it weren't for Sly and The Family Stone, James Brown and Michael Jackson. We perform the absolute best songs that have been written and delivered over the last thirty years. That’s what we do.”

Nolan and his band have played at nearly every beach city festival in the Los Angeles basin from the Santa Monica Pier to Redondo Beach. Nolan is jazzed to bring his party to The El Segundo Art Walk and thinks that free public events are essential to building community.

“I'm a great believer in free art,” he said, “and that communities need to support themselves by making it available.”

The Tom Nolan Band will perform at the ESAW’s Main + Grand stage 5 to 6:45 p.m. August 23.