Behind the scenes, the company was forging ahead: Antony Tudor continued as the most significant choreographer, Agnes de Mille and Jerome Robbins made some of the defining works of ballet Americana (Fall River Legend, Fancy Free), George Balanchine created his masterly Theme and Variations, and a generation of American-trained dancers, notably Nora Kaye and Alicia Alonso, emerged.
The album: First Mind Previous releases: Knee-deep in the North Sea – 2008 (Portico Quartet); Isla – 2009 (Portico Quartet) What we said: "Americana finger-picking happily coexists with Afro and calypso rhythms.
It's a moment out of time preserved with love: the long bar, the wood panelling and mirrored booths, the long-aproned senior waiters, the classic cocktails, the neon… it's all thrilling to the fan of classic Americana.
"The people that I know that are making music, they now have a name for us and they call it Americana.
My Dutch Americana friends are up next.
Such basics, the firm believes, have the added benefit of appealing to a wider audience than the preppy Americana sold by Gap or the faddish wares of Inditex and H&M.Although it opened its first store in 1984, Uniqlo really got going in the early 1990s, just as Japan was entering a long period of economic anaemia.
Some may sneer, but ordinary Frenchmen adore Americana.
Sure, it's possible that Barack Obama's tastes really run to anodyne adult contemporary Americana like Bruce Springstein and Sheryl Crow.
Yet, 40 years later, as Vietnam marks the anniversary of unification, America's defeat in Vietnam looks in retrospect no more than a blip in a prolonged Pax Americana.
The periods of pax Americana have been very limited.
But it also signalled China's willingness to help America end the Vietnam war, and thus to tolerate an Asian pax Americana.
