TV REVIEWS : ‘Sesame Street’ Jams With the Best of Them

Yes, there is one TV series that pop acts consider even hepper to land themselves a guest spot on than “The Larry Sanders Show.”

For those of us who like watching “Sesame Street” for the music, then, but get impatient because we already know how to count, there’s sweet relief tonight in the form of “Sesame Street Jam: A Musical Celebration,” a solid home-taping prospect that rounds up a good number of recent celeb song sightings from the tyke telecast.

Best of all is En Vogue’s bouncy “Adventure,” an actual stab at emulating the form of a music video, in which the vocal quartet tells several apocryphal tall tales and gives the kids something they can feel--i.e., fuzz-balls Elmo and Ernie. It’s as irresistible, in its way, as anything running on MTV; they’re as swell as big sisters as they are as sex bombs.

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Less lavishly produced, but also priceless, is Los Lobos’ variation on their eerie, soothing lullaby “Kiko and the Lavender Moon,” recast with Elmo as the tune’s contented nighttime dreamer, dancing fecklessly on a picket fence.

Among the more obvious lesson plans, Queen Latifah turns in a charmingly spunky hip-hop ode to the letter O, and Maya Angelou pipes up with a way-catchy paean to taking pride in one’s name. For novelty’s sake, there’s Marilyn Horne’s operatically rendered “C is for Cookie” and Little Richard’s slightly tired “Rubber Ducky.” The equally ubiquitous Aaron Neville trades vibratos with Ernie.

The new interstitial material plots Big Bird’s search for some “la-la-ers” for the special, which finally bears fruit in a climactic deus ex machina appearance by South African a cappella troupe Ladysmith Black Mambazo--a fitting end to an hour that draws as avid a parental as juvenile viewership. * “Sesame Street Jam: A Musical Celebration” airs at 7:30 tonight on KCET-TV Channel 28.