'What fun it is to sing on Channel 6 today'

If you thought, “Hey, that vocalist with the impressive scatting looks a lot like Lt. Col. James Rhodes from the Iron Man movies,” you’d be correct — it’s Academy Award nominee and Golden Globe winning actor Don Cheadle.

Cheadle and his classmates were featured on a Rocky Mountain PBS program called “Prime Time,” a weekly series about the Denver Public Schools system. The show was hosted by Ed Sardella, the longtime anchor at KUSA who retired in 2001.

For “Prime Time,” the Angelaires began their performance with “Everybody’s Boppin,” a song by Lambert, Hendricks & Ross. Cheadle added a holiday flair to the song, starting off his solo with “Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way. What fun it is to sing on Channel 6 today.”

Cheadle graduated from East High in 1982. After earning a degree from the California Institute of the Arts, he went on to become a highly decorated actor and has been nominated for an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony.

At East High, Cheadle was a multihyphenate. He played the saxophone (one of his bandmates was Ron Miles, who recently passed away), performed in school plays and was a member of the Angelaires, the school’s advanced jazz choir.

As Sardella noted in the video above, the Angelaires were the only high school group selected in 1982 to perform for the National Association for Jazz Educators during the organization’s yearly convention.

In a recent interview with Conan O’Brien, Cheadle said that he received scholarships to study vocal jazz in college, but he decided to pursue acting because he realized that achieving the success of his musical heroes Charlie Parker, Cannonball Adderley or Miles Davis was likely out of reach (Cheadle would later direct and star in “Miles Ahead,” a biopic about Davis).

“I think you made a good choice,” O’Brien quipped about Cheadle’s decision to become an actor. “It’s worked out pretty well.”

In an older late night appearance, Cheadle flipped through his high school yearbook with Jimmy Fallon, who poked fun at Cheadle’s participation in East High’s annual mime show.