Checking in with JAMIE FOXX

Jamie Foxx may be happier than ever to be back with “Beat Shazam.”

The Oscar-winning actor, comedian and musician had an unspecified medical emergency and subsequent hospitalization last year, but he returns — along with his daughter Corinne (“Dollface”) — to preside over the Fox game show when it begins its seventh season Tuesday, May 28. Two-person teams try to identify songs, with the highest-scoring duo then going up against the music app Shazam for a chance to win $1 million. This season, some teams will consist of fathers, mothers, siblings, teachers and others who have a shared identity.

Also an executive producer of “Beat Shazam,” Jamie Foxx might have seemed a surprising person to fill the hosting job when the show premiered in 2017. By that point, Foxx was a well-established movie star, having won an Academy Award and many other honors for his portrayal of music icon Ray Charles in “Ray” (2004). He also had a 2007 Grammy for his collaboration with T-Pain on “Blame It.”

However, taking a job on the Fox network was a homecoming of sorts for Foxx, since he had been a cast member of the sketch comedy series “In Living Color” in the early 1990s. He also appeared in the Fox show “Roc,” then parlayed those experiences into his own sitcom for the then-WB Network, the appropriately named “The Jamie Foxx Show.”

During that weekly TV tenure for him, Foxx was also cementing his movie work with such credits as the Oliver Stone-directed football drama “Any Given Sunday” (1999) and the melodrama “Collateral” (2004). He was also building a musical identity, by working with the likes of Kanye West (“Runaway”) and Ludacris (“Get Back”), establishing his own success in that field via such albums as “Intuition” and “Best Night of My Life.”

With “Beat Shazam” now resuming, Foxx gets to satisfy multiple entertainment-business roles for himself again — and, best of all, to do it with much-improved health.