Martian's sexual awakening as documented by music:
As a young lad on the cusp of adolescence, my musical preferences were informed by my older siblings. Like many young men before and after me, I thought that whatever my brothers were listening to was about as cool as it got. Thus, in the early nineties when I was but a boy just beginning his journey towards manhood my days were filled with Red Hot Chili Peppers and Guns n' Roses. Even then, I discovered that some tracks spoke to me in a way that the others didn't:
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Shortly after these early musical (and sexual) influences, Seattle grunge exploded into the mainstream, bringing with it a whole new sound. I was awed by the raw emotion I heard in these new songs with their seemingly non-sensical lyrics and often unintelligible singers:
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I remember where I was when I heard that Kurt Cobain had committed suicide. Do you?
At 14 I enrolled at the local high school and found my musical horizons vastly broadened. I now had access to a well-structured music program, and as a burgeoning young instrumentalist, jazz captivated me. The idea that you could play precisely what you're feeling
at the moment of playing was foreign to a young man raised on popular music, but intensely exciting. My music teacher, himself a trumpet player, encouraged and nurtured this new-found love, lending me cd's and occasionally vinyl records from his private collection for me to listen to and explore. Unfortunately finding the same recordings I listened to is difficult to impossible, but I remember clearly the first time I heard Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers performing Wheel Within A Wheel, of Getz belting out Autumn Leaves, or Wynton Marsalis blazing through My Funny Valentine. Many of the old standards were introduced to me by the greats of the craft, and every rendition of these songs I've heard since has been compared to that first encounter. This opened up a whole new level of awareness for me, as I listened to these men and occasionally women (I've never known why jazz is so male-dominated, but it is) take these cold, lifeless constructs of wood and brass and steel and turned them into living, breathing creatures full of pain and excitement and joy. The idea that the music itself, rather than the words or the voice, could be a vehicle for a message opened up a whole new vista of music appreciation for me.
This barely scratches the surface of my music experiences as a young man. These events happened as I was discovering girls for the first time, and I would say are therefore tied very closely to my sexual development. There's much more to this story and I may relate the rest of it at a later time, but for now I think this is enough to be getting on with.