World Building Project - A World Without Jazz

Here was my part:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zGRIn4xDgs&list=UU50jG8fgZvCxdVQielQApdQ

In high school, I auditioned for, and was accepted into an extremely competitive and prestigious Jazz choir at my school. After spending a year performing and competing with this group, I fell completely in love with Jazz music, and this love has only grown stronger with time. 

This is what I was thinking about when I first suggested a world without jazz. However, when thinking about the progress of music over time, I realized that Jazz, the Blues, or Ragtime have influenced most modern music in some way. Therefore, for this project, my group decided to create a world where those influences do not exist. In doing some research, we found that classical music from Europe greatly influenced the music being made in the US up until the creation of Ragtime, which then influenced the creation of Blues and Jazz. All of these forms of music were originally influenced by African spirituals, which were brought to the US by slaves. Since that time, this music has gone on to influence the creation of hip-hop, rock, disco, soul, pop, and R&B music. 

When one consider the significant cultural influences that each of these genres have had over the last several decades, it becomes quite apparent that a world without the influence of Ragtime music would look very different from the world we live in today. We surmised that if Ragtime had never been created that much of the music of the US would still be influenced by the music from Europe. Additionally, we concluded that without Ragtime to get the ball rolling, that the music being produced would not have changed very much. From class, we were inspired by drawings shown of costumes from another world that had been designed.  We thought about how music and how it has affected culture. From this we considered the ways that music has had an indirect or direct influence on the way that people dress. We also considered modern pop-culture, and how it would be different if we took out the influences of Ragtime music (as well as Jazz and the Blues).  We concluded that people would pay big money to see musicians like Yo Yo Ma. While he, and other classically trained musicians are already very famous, we concluded that these musicians would be on the same level of fame as celebrities like Kanye West, Beyonce, and Justin Bieber. Without the influence of Ragtime, music would not have changed much over the past 100 years. We would still be listening to classical music, with strong European influences, and the people making that music would be our celebrities.