AlternativeSoundtrack4 #3
(The Triumphs – Burnt Biscuits)
It’s time to introduce the ‘Fat Man’ aka Minnesota Fats depicted in swaggering, nonchelant and fine style by Jackie Gleason.
Eddie has been ‘shooting stick’ in anticipation of Minnesota’s Arrival at 8 bells…Fat’s arrives and watches Eddie shoot, comments and ‘the game’ begins..
Just thought I would mention that Jackie Gleason shot pool regularly while growing up in New York and didnt need a stand-in so all his shots are his own…
The music is again from 1961, (trying as hard as I can to keep it tight), a Memphis Rhythm and Blues instrumental cut on the newly formed Volt label, a (subsidary of Stax), from a band called The Triumphs featuring Howard Grimes on drums, Marvell Thomas, (Rufus Thomas’s son), on the organ and piano, Lewis Steinberg on bass and the songs writer, original Stax engineer Chips Moman on guitar.
themusicologist 
No Burnt Biscuits or Minnesota Fats on my widget! an appetite wetting description of the upcoming action though!
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thanks for letting me know…should be there now !!
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Well worth the wait though…. great bit of early sixties music…. do I hear shades of Jimmy Smith on that there organ?
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you do hear shades of Jimmy Smith…although Wild Bill Davis, (who rock and rolled with Louis Jordan’s pioneering Tympany 5), was the instruments earliest master..It was after hearing Wild Bill on said instrument that a young Smith found his direction.
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terrific…both the dialogue between our man and Fats, which absolutely conveys the sizing up of each other both men are doing and the sooooooo tight slice of fast action music! brilliantly matched in my opinion.
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Jackie Gleason steals the show for me…..the way he delivers his very few lines is, for me, art in motion. probably gets no more than 10 Lines in the whole film but I have always hung on every ‘nugget’. Followed by a ranking ‘modernist’ Rhythm & Blues stomper to boot !! spot on the vanguard of a new, (musical), epoch.
“Is That A Fact….”
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Yep, class, pure class. And how about…
“now and then, you know how it is…..”
It don’t get much better than that. It’s the laid-back way he replies and leaves it all hanging between statement and question that has always tickled me!!
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“now and then” ……… like you say, pure class.
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