Milford’s Home-Grown Jazz Trio with Mark Zaleski on Alto and Soprano Saxophones

Have you ever heard Radiohead or Nirvana songs played at a jazz concert? If your answer is “no,” you likely have a problem – you don’t get out enough to hear Mark Zaleski play live.

In March of 2024, Zaleski took the stage at the Regattabar, the famed Boston jazz club in the Charles Hotel outside of Harvard Square. He was joined by a host of jazz titans, including his brother, Brooklyn-based pianist Glenn Zaleski, and New York City-based drummer Mark Whitfield, Jr. (former bandmate of Stephen and Greg Chaplin who is now seen appearing with the likes of jazz legends Kenny Garrett, Terrance Blanchard, and others). If you hadn’t read the subheadings on the advertisements for Zaleski’s concert, you would have thought you were in for an aesthetic befitting of a Dave Brubeck appearance at the Newport Jazz Festival (especially with two of the band members having completed undergraduate coursework at the famed Brubeck Institute). But the eighth notes were quickly straightened, “Poinciana” was traded in for Pearl Jam, and the ensemble “let it rip” nearly from the word “go” to the proverbial “finish line.”

March of 2025 will present a jazz show with a similar level of novelty. This time Zaleski will come to Milford and team up with Milford’s Home-Grown Jazz Trio to fondly remember the music of the 1990s. Zaleski will remind us there was great pop and rock music born of the 1990s, as well as great jazz records, some “straight down the pike,” and some borrowing from or even taking a detour into the more avant-guard side of the art form. The evening thus promises to be a diverse array of music, both jazz as your parents may have remembered, as well as musical fusions the likes of Michael Jackson, Pearl Jam, and Radiohead may never themselves have imagined.