TV Reviews : ‘Missa Luba’ on KCET Celebrates Easter Season the African Way

If you’ve had your fill of Crucifixion scenes, yet aren’t prepared to separate the holiday from its meaning, there’s no better Easter special you could watch this weekend than “Missa Luba,” a one-hour special combining the music of the African Mass with footage of the people, flora and fauna of the continent of origin itself. (It airs on Channel 28 tonight at midnight and again on Sunday at 5 p.m.)

It’s equal parts anthropological education, soothing New Age-style travelogue and religious experience. While the Muungano National Choir of Kenya sings on the soundtrack, the cameras leave the empty church and roam the countryside, finding playful elk, scratching lions, foraging giraffes, as if these themselves testify to the glory of God.

In between numbers, several choir members return to the lands of their individual tribes and describe both life at home and the meaning of this music to them.

There’s a hit record on the pop charts now by Enigma called “Sadeness,” which in very calculated, Malcolm McLaren fashion combines ancient Gregorian chants with modern electronic dance music. It’s easy to understand why that incongruous blend of the ritualistic and the sensual appeals to the senses, but this choir’s mesmerizingly uplifting music is the real thing: Traditional, richly melodic strains of the Christian choral tradition set against gentle tribal rhythms. No offense, Paul Simon, but this is Graceland.