Like other documentaries by Mr. Mugge, who specializes in austere celebrations of roots music, the movie is remarkable for its lack of hyperbole.
Two years after that, he decided to join his guru in a small village in central India to begin seven years of austere, intensive training rooted in the Hindu (and Gandhian) ideal of brahmacharya.
The cell, Tawhid and Jihad, was heavily influenced by men like Osama bin Laden, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and by Wahhabism, an austere sect of radical Islam whose roots lie in the Arabian Peninsula.
But until "Din Da Da," the wordless hidden track featuring the drums of Ahmir Questlove Thompson, the music is so austere it seems the Roots have already withdrawn to their own private bunker.
For all Williams's roots in austere postwar leftism, this book fitted – perhaps even on some level accepted – a time of greater consumer choice and individualism: in Britain in 1976, much of what is still thought of as "the 80s" was already well underway.
Rattigan, who was also gay, is rooted in austere postwar Britain and Davies is a master at conjuring up the period.
Alston's choreographic roots are in the austere soil of mid-20th-century American abstraction.
The movement has its roots, not in the austere Islamic fundamentalism that dominates popular Western imagination these days, but in the Beat Generation and the hippies who pursued spiritual quests to Morocco when it was a counterculturalist Mecca of sun, sand and cheap hashish.
Although a high point of what might be called "jazz rock", the project's roots lie in a more austere enterprise.
If Zarqawi and his network are eclipsing bin Laden and al-Qaeda, as some terrorist experts believe, then it is a form of terrorism that betrays its roots in Zarqa's brutish underworld, not some austere Arabian seminary.
