Johannesburg — GOOD broadcasting about music is rare. Most South African stations assume that music radio means a "personality" playing records. The level of knowledge among DJs is distressingly low, and tight play-listing seems to preclude any choice outside mass-market popularity.

But if radio is bad, television is far worse. The genre music programmes - traditional and gospel - rely on the character and energy of their presenters to leaven uninspired filming on bare stages, interspersed with promotional videos.

Interview segments focus on personality and product. The meaning of music, and the issues of the industry, are rarely discussed. Documentary series are rare. With few exceptions, we are fed public relations, not music journalism.

So it is refreshing to provide news of an excellent music documentary series which, with the SABC's usual marketing flair, has crept onto our screens with minimal publicity.

The public broadcaster has tucked Pops Mohamed's six-part Southern Rhythms series into the faith slot on Sunday mornings at 9am on SABC2. That's not entirely inappropriate, since the series deals in part with the spiritual inspiration behind various types of music . It may, however, rob the programmes of many potential viewers, who are asleep at that hour, at worship, or interested in music rather than religion. And Southern Rhythms is about far more than its scheduling implies. The series of one- hour programmes follows multi-instrumentalist Mohamed on a journey across SA. His stopping points are various spiritual loci: not merely formal places of worship, but also communities.

Practitioners demonstrate musical traditions, and discuss inspiration and technique equally articulately.

Mohamed is an excellent interviewer: personal, unassuming and unafraid of asking simple questions whose answers are by no means obvious. So far, the music has created cues for conversations around cultural pride, liberation theology, environment and nature, gender in the Anglican Church and the struggles of early Sufi political prisoners in the Cape.

Musicians talk in their home languages and seem to be well translated by the subtitles. The sound -- recorded by the inestimable Ian Osrin - does the music justice. Then Mohamed the player takes over. He analyses the music, demonstrating, for example, what polyrhythms mean, how a thumb-piano works, or what the scales and elements are in Sufi vocal harmony, and he jams with the musicians he encounters.

In the final segment of each programme, he exercises his most notable talent: creating studio mixes that blend and layer the sounds he has explored that week.

The results are sometimes spiritual, sometimes soothing and often musically startling. Many would fit well at a club or trance festival, although far more interesting than the average trance track .

It would be disappointing if these mixes were not presented on an album once the series ends.

On Sunday evenings, another musician, Johnny Clegg, gets an hour in A Country Imagined to discuss with eloquence art and the South African landscape.

Clegg's is an erudite, illuminating documentary. It is far superior to the alarmist right-wing propaganda from Turner TV that filled the nature slot on SABC3 last month, or the shallow, Amerocentric world history still dominating Sunday afternoons on that channel.

Those examples are cited merely to point out that there is no shortage of spaces for good indigenous documentaries. Southern Rhythms is as engaging an exploration of our music as Clegg's is of our art. However, the element of new music creation makes it far more innovative in approach. Rarely do documentaries anywhere in the world move beyond talking heads into territory like this. A prime viewing slot would be a fitting acknowledgment. There are four more programmes remaining. Don't miss them.