Jamie Foxx blends music, comedy during ambitious tour opening in Las Vegas

Back in the day, he was the rare black dude who could get up onstage and kill 'em with a dead-on imitation of Ronald Reagan.

Two and a half decades later, Jamie Foxx is still at it, speaking, yelling, whispering, singing, laughing, hyperventilating in that dimensionless voice of his, going from pitch-perfect takes on Bill Cosby to Lee Greenwood to Mike Tyson to Barack Obama from one breath to the next.

As a conversationalist, he's fond of lots of sharp, hairpin turns.

Currently, Foxx is connecting the far-flung dots between the symphony and the ghetto.

Born and raised in Texas, Foxx went to school on a classical piano scholarship at San Diego's International University.

After college, he moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career in music.

But he was flat broke, had no money to cut a demo, and so he took his musical background, slathered it in some funny, and put it to use in comedy clubs.

"I would take opera music, like real sophisticated music, and put it with 'hood music," Foxx recalls with an audible smirk. "Like, I would take Snoop Dogg and go (in a high, sonorous singing voice) 'Rolling down the street smoking endo, sippin' on gin and juice.' "

From there, Foxx's comedic prospects would quickly outpace his musical career.

But these days, the music has finally caught up with Foxx.

Or maybe it's the other way around for the Academy Award-winning, multitalented entertainer.

Foxx's latest disc, "Intuition," his third overall, which was recorded in Las Vegas, is far and away the most contemporary sounding album from this soul throwback who grew up on a steady diet of traditionalists, from the Winans family to George Strait.

With a platinum-coated guest list of hip-hop heavyweights such as Kanye West, Lil Wayne, T.I. and T-Pain lending modernist production values, techno beats and overheated rhymes to the record, Foxx has attempted to harness the zeitgeist instead of countering it as he has in the past.

In other words, he's trying to stay young.

"We definitely had to challenge ourselves and move beyond R&B a little bit, because R&B is on life support right now. All of my friends who do R&B, nobody's on the charts," Foxx says. "I came in with some songs that were sort of old school R&B, and my guy (producer) Breyon Prescott said, 'If you do that type of music, your music is gonna end up in the bin in the front of the grocery store, you know, with the nail clippers. You gotta stretch.' "

And stretch he did, but not without some griping from the R&B hard-liners who once saw Foxx as a fresh face to reinvigorate an old sound.

One new development for Foxx on "Intuition" is his use of the equally loved and loathed Auto-Tune, a now ubiquitous pop and hip-hop vocal effect that can both correct any discrepancies in pitch and make singers sound like hiccuping robots.

"A lot of my other R&B cohorts were like, 'You're gonna disrespect us. You're gonna bastardize the craft,' " Foxx says of his decision to use the vocal processor. "I said, 'I'm not bastardizing the craft. When you can find Auto-Tune and a great song and it works together, it's the best blend.' I like Auto-Tune. I like what T-Pain does. I thought it was interesting how he revamped and reshaped things, sort of calling upon the ghost of Roger Troutman."

Despite his musical background, and the fact that he's sold more than 3 million albums in the past four years, Foxx is still best known from his stint on the popular comedy variety show "In Living Color" and his many high-profile acting roles, most notably his performance as Ray Charles in the acclaimed "Ray" -- of course, it's not long into the interview before Foxx is busting out a loud and lovingly done impersonation of the storied piano man.

But whenever an actor embarks on a career in music, ugly images of Bruce Willis in shades, strangling the life out of a harmonica, or Eddie Murphy in the studio with Rick James bombard the mind's eye like rotten fruit.

Foxx knows this.

He's well aware that whatever he does in music will be considered a novelty until he demonstrates otherwise, over and over again.

"I still think that I'm validating it. I'm still young at it," Foxx says of his musical career. "I think that three more albums -- and I'm going to crank them out here pretty fast -- will definitely solidify me. But right now, I still feel like I'm that rookie. I still feel like people want to know what's going on. Defining the music is what I'm really trying to do."

This is why Foxx is about to embark on his most ambitious tour, a long, 50-date trek that marks his most extensive road work yet. The show will be a mix of music and comedy, a newfangled variety show with Foxx at the center of it all. The tour is opening in Vegas, where Foxx used to live, near Sunrise Mountain, from around 1995 to 2002.

He recalls the craziness of Sin City with awe and aims to return with some of his own.

"I had some of the most wild and crazy experiences in Vegas, man," Foxx recalls. "I just go, 'Wow, how did I survive?'

"When we descend on Vegas, it's going to be all out music, comedy, fun, party -- in that order," he continues. "We're gonna blame it on the a-a-a-alcohol. We're really gonna do that in spectacular fashion. And what better place than Las Vegas to blame it on?"

Contact reporter Jason Bracelin at jbracelin@ reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0476.