The Chicago Blackhawks had a really nice start to the 2022-23 NHL season. They won some games that nobody thought they would ever even come close to winning which turned some heads. Unfortunately, they are starting to come back down to earth.

On Wednesday, they hosted the St. Louis Blues in a rivalry game on national TV. Things went very poorly against this Blues team that has struggled to begin the year. They have a roster good enough to bounce back and they had a good start to that with a big win over the Hawks.

The Blues went out to a 2-0 lead thanks to goals from Calle Rosen and Jordan Kyrou. Andreas Athanasiou brought them to within one goal but then the Blues restored the two-goal lead just under a minute later thanks to a goal by Ryan O’Reilly.

Athanasiou scored his second of the game later in the period but it was once again responded to quickly as Tyler Pitlick scored a few minutes later. Ivan Barbashev added one in the third period and the Blues took care of business for the 5-3 victory.

The Chicago Blackhawks have not been a good hockey team in recent games.

For the last few games now, the Hawks have looked every bit as bad as we thought they were going to be before the season began. They are starting to fall well below the playoff line and are inching closer to the bottom of the Western Conference standings.

There are a lot of teams in that mix though so it will be interesting to see how it all shakes out in the end. There is no doubt that the Hawks have a roster capable of being the worst in the league.

They could potentially get even worse if they decide to make some impact trades. At this point, the futures of guys like Patrick Kane and Jonathan Toews are very cloudy.

It is nice to see guys like Athanasiou and Max Domi raise their trade value every day too. This team can load up with more picks and prospects if they play their cards right in the coming months before the NHL trade deadline.

The Blackhawks are off for a few days now as they will take this show on the road. They will be on the east coast to take on the Boston Bruins on Saturday night.

That is surely going to be an interesting game as the Bruins currently lead the NHL standings. It would be nice to see the Hawks at least be in the game and show the ability to keep up with the high-flying B’s.

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Since 2004 Plastic Crimewave (aka Steve Krakow) has used the Secret History of Chicago Music to shine a light on worthy artists with Chicago ties who’ve been forgotten, underrated, or never noticed in the first place.

I’m part Polish, but in 18 years of the Secret History of Chicago Music, I’ve somehow never covered a polka musician. By certain generous estimates, around 1,900,000 people of Polish descent live in the Chicago metropolitan area—it’s the largest such community in the United States and the second worldwide only to Warsaw. Polka originated in the early 19th century in Bohemia (now part of the Czech Republic), and during its long history it’s been wildly popular in many countries and on several continents. But here in Chicago, it’s powerfully associated with the city’s Polish enclaves. 

Polka relies on accordion or concertina, and depending on its region of origin, it might also employ fiddle, clarinet, trumpet, trombone, tuba, bass, or drums. It tends to use upbeat rhythms in 2/4 time, and it’s usually music for couples dancing. Chicago polka is its own thing, with roots in the postwar years, and generally has slower tempos (for easier rug cutting) and a more improvisational bent. It spawned two substyles: the “Chicago honky” and the fuller-sounding “Chicago push.” This week’s SHoCM subject, Walter “Li’l Wally” Jagiello, played a major role in creating this modern polka sound.

Singer, drummer, and concertina player Walter E. Jagiello (aka Władysław Jagiełło) also performed as “Mały Władziu” and “Mały Władzio”—both of which mean “Li’l Wally” in Polish. He was born in Chicago’s East Village neighborhood on August 1, 1930, near the Polish Triangle—the symbolic heart of the city’s oldest Polish settlement. The son of Polish immigrants, Jagiello often said “he came out of his mother’s womb singing,” according to his wife and business partner, Jeanette, who was quoted in his Chicago Tribune obituary in 2006.

At eight years old, Jagiello would get hoisted onto picnic tables to belt out tunes at Sunday Polish gatherings in Caldwell Woods near Milwaukee and Devon. He earned his nickname “Li’l Wally” while still actually a little kid, but even as an adult he only grew to five foot six. When Jagiello was ten, future polka concertina legend Eddie Zima, himself still in his teens, hired him to sing in his orchestra, which played up and down “Polish Broadway”—the busy Division Street strip between Ashland and Western, reputed to have been home to more than 50 Polish clubs in its heyday.

Jagiello never went to high school—instead he became a bandleader at 15, when Stanley Korzeniak, owner of the Lucky Stop Inn on Division, booked him for a gig and insisted he start his own group. Jagiello had already made a habit of sneaking out to see concerts at night: “I’d leave the window open a few inches,” he told Reader contributor Carl Kozlowski in 1999. “When I got back, if the window was closed, I knew I was in trouble.” But while his parents may have figured out he wasn’t abiding by his bedtime, they didn’t realize he was a neighborhood star. “They thought I was a crook because I always had all this money,” Jagiello said.

Jagiello had his first recording session in 1946, at which point he was still singing entirely in Polish. He released the tunes via his own small label, Amber Records, which he’d founded when he was 16. (Poland is associated with amber because of the large deposits in the Baltic Sea, some of which have been carried into the country by rivers and glaciers.)

Jagiello more than earned his other most famous nickname—the Polka King—by building his own cottage industry devoted to the music. He bought an office building on South Kedzie, built his own studio on the premises with help from Motorola engineer Jim Hogan, and acquired vinyl-pressing equipment from the Finebilt company of Cincinnati, Ohio. He gigged all over the midwest, usually with a trio of concertina, trumpet, and drums; for bigger shows he’d bring in clarinet, bass, or violin. He usually called his band some variation on “the Harmony Boys” (the Happy Harmony Boys, the Lucky Harmony Boys Orchestra, et cetera), but backing musicians came and went constantly—most of them worked day jobs in factories and couldn’t commit to extended runs.

Jagiello bought a new studio in Florida and kept touring and recording, albeit at a slower pace. He’d return to Chicago to gig, but as the city’s Polish enclaves began to decline, he started booking suburban banquet halls instead. “I still come back two or three times a year to show all the club owners I’m still alive, and to show the other bands how it’s done,” Jagiello told Kozlowski. “Other musicians are always spreading rumors that I’ve died, gotten sick, or have dropped my price. . . . Polka’s a competitive scene.”

“He would come to Chicago about once a year, play at some banquet hall like the White Eagle out in Niles,” Hedeker said. “So in 1999, we set up this show at Zakopane Lounge, which is on Division there, and the idea was the Polkaholics were going to be his backing band. I thought, ‘Wow, his vocal with our way of playing polka would be super cool. It would give us so much legitimacy right there!’ That’s what I thought anyway.”

Jagiello might have approved of the Polkaholics in principle, but he didn’t care for their sound. “At practice, as soon as we start the first song, he yells, ‘No, no, no, no, no!’ He was kind of a control freak,” Hedeker said. “He basically neutered us. He said, ‘What’s wrong with your guitar?’ I said, ‘It’s distortion.’ ‘I don’t want that!’ . . . It was very much like that [Chuck Berry] movie, Hail! Hail! Rock ’n’ Roll—except I’m not Keith Richards!” 

The Polkaholics weren’t prepared to deal with the expectations of an old-school bandleader either. “We spent that whole summer trying to learn as many of his songs as we possibly could, and then at that practice he changed the key on everything,” Hedeker recalled. “It was just a waste of time!”

The concert turned out to be a good time, but not for the reasons Hedeker expected. “So we do the show the next night, and I can’t even tell you how pumped up I was for that show—opening for Li’l Wally was like a dream come true,” he said. “As we were playing our set, he was at the bar and all these people were buying him shots. So by the time he comes on, he was just tanked! So it was quite an event, but musically, it wasn’t all that great, really.”

It might take a Polkaholic to see Jagiello as punk rock, but there’s no arguing that he threw his whole heart and soul into the music he loved. If there’s any justice in the world, he’ll be remembered forever—and not just by the International Polka Association Hall of Fame.

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Since 2004 Plastic Crimewave (aka Steve Krakow) has used the Secret History of Chicago Music to shine a light on worthy artists with Chicago ties who’ve been forgotten, underrated, or never noticed in the first place.

I’m part Polish, but in 18 years of the Secret History of Chicago Music, I’ve somehow never covered a polka musician. By certain generous estimates, around 1,900,000 people of Polish descent live in the Chicago metropolitan area—it’s the largest such community in the United States and the second worldwide only to Warsaw. Polka originated in the early 19th century in Bohemia (now part of the Czech Republic), and during its long history it’s been wildly popular in many countries and on several continents. But here in Chicago, it’s powerfully associated with the city’s Polish enclaves. 

Polka relies on accordion or concertina, and depending on its region of origin, it might also employ fiddle, clarinet, trumpet, trombone, tuba, bass, or drums. It tends to use upbeat rhythms in 2/4 time, and it’s usually music for couples dancing. Chicago polka is its own thing, with roots in the postwar years, and generally has slower tempos (for easier rug cutting) and a more improvisational bent. It spawned two substyles: the “Chicago honky” and the fuller-sounding “Chicago push.” This week’s SHoCM subject, Walter “Li’l Wally” Jagiello, played a major role in creating this modern polka sound.

Singer, drummer, and concertina player Walter E. Jagiello (aka Władysław Jagiełło) also performed as “Mały Władziu” and “Mały Władzio”—both of which mean “Li’l Wally” in Polish. He was born in Chicago’s East Village neighborhood on August 1, 1930, near the Polish Triangle—the symbolic heart of the city’s oldest Polish settlement. The son of Polish immigrants, Jagiello often said “he came out of his mother’s womb singing,” according to his wife and business partner, Jeanette, who was quoted in his Chicago Tribune obituary in 2006.

At eight years old, Jagiello would get hoisted onto picnic tables to belt out tunes at Sunday Polish gatherings in Caldwell Woods near Milwaukee and Devon. He earned his nickname “Li’l Wally” while still actually a little kid, but even as an adult he only grew to five foot six. When Jagiello was ten, future polka concertina legend Eddie Zima, himself still in his teens, hired him to sing in his orchestra, which played up and down “Polish Broadway”—the busy Division Street strip between Ashland and Western, reputed to have been home to more than 50 Polish clubs in its heyday.

Jagiello never went to high school—instead he became a bandleader at 15, when Stanley Korzeniak, owner of the Lucky Stop Inn on Division, booked him for a gig and insisted he start his own group. Jagiello had already made a habit of sneaking out to see concerts at night: “I’d leave the window open a few inches,” he told Reader contributor Carl Kozlowski in 1999. “When I got back, if the window was closed, I knew I was in trouble.” But while his parents may have figured out he wasn’t abiding by his bedtime, they didn’t realize he was a neighborhood star. “They thought I was a crook because I always had all this money,” Jagiello said.

Jagiello had his first recording session in 1946, at which point he was still singing entirely in Polish. He released the tunes via his own small label, Amber Records, which he’d founded when he was 16. (Poland is associated with amber because of the large deposits in the Baltic Sea, some of which have been carried into the country by rivers and glaciers.)

Jagiello more than earned his other most famous nickname—the Polka King—by building his own cottage industry devoted to the music. He bought an office building on South Kedzie, built his own studio on the premises with help from Motorola engineer Jim Hogan, and acquired vinyl-pressing equipment from the Finebilt company of Cincinnati, Ohio. He gigged all over the midwest, usually with a trio of concertina, trumpet, and drums; for bigger shows he’d bring in clarinet, bass, or violin. He usually called his band some variation on “the Harmony Boys” (the Happy Harmony Boys, the Lucky Harmony Boys Orchestra, et cetera), but backing musicians came and went constantly—most of them worked day jobs in factories and couldn’t commit to extended runs.

Jagiello bought a new studio in Florida and kept touring and recording, albeit at a slower pace. He’d return to Chicago to gig, but as the city’s Polish enclaves began to decline, he started booking suburban banquet halls instead. “I still come back two or three times a year to show all the club owners I’m still alive, and to show the other bands how it’s done,” Jagiello told Kozlowski. “Other musicians are always spreading rumors that I’ve died, gotten sick, or have dropped my price. . . . Polka’s a competitive scene.”

“He would come to Chicago about once a year, play at some banquet hall like the White Eagle out in Niles,” Hedeker said. “So in 1999, we set up this show at Zakopane Lounge, which is on Division there, and the idea was the Polkaholics were going to be his backing band. I thought, ‘Wow, his vocal with our way of playing polka would be super cool. It would give us so much legitimacy right there!’ That’s what I thought anyway.”

Jagiello might have approved of the Polkaholics in principle, but he didn’t care for their sound. “At practice, as soon as we start the first song, he yells, ‘No, no, no, no, no!’ He was kind of a control freak,” Hedeker said. “He basically neutered us. He said, ‘What’s wrong with your guitar?’ I said, ‘It’s distortion.’ ‘I don’t want that!’ . . . It was very much like that [Chuck Berry] movie, Hail! Hail! Rock ’n’ Roll—except I’m not Keith Richards!” 

The Polkaholics weren’t prepared to deal with the expectations of an old-school bandleader either. “We spent that whole summer trying to learn as many of his songs as we possibly could, and then at that practice he changed the key on everything,” Hedeker recalled. “It was just a waste of time!”

The concert turned out to be a good time, but not for the reasons Hedeker expected. “So we do the show the next night, and I can’t even tell you how pumped up I was for that show—opening for Li’l Wally was like a dream come true,” he said. “As we were playing our set, he was at the bar and all these people were buying him shots. So by the time he comes on, he was just tanked! So it was quite an event, but musically, it wasn’t all that great, really.”

It might take a Polkaholic to see Jagiello as punk rock, but there’s no arguing that he threw his whole heart and soul into the music he loved. If there’s any justice in the world, he’ll be remembered forever—and not just by the International Polka Association Hall of Fame.

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Like many of us, Salvador the inventor has a lot of gadgets. Instead of accessing TikTok with his smartphone, he has an admittedly more retro and cartoonlike system, featuring giant levers and light-bulb colander hats to go with his tape deck and phonographs. His aesthetic is steampunk hoarder melded with cottagecore quaintness, but the end result of his stuff is the same—it’s a place to store his memories. Salvador likes to relive certain aspects of his life, the beautiful moment of falling in love, the excitement of youth when you imagined you could save the world . . . but also the sadder moments, like the strain of a song at the edge of a memory, or the heartrending loss of one’s partner. 

MemorabiliaSat 11/19 7:30 PM and Sun 11/20 3:30 PM, BateyUrbano, 2620 W. Division, reservations through Brown Paper Tickets, $20

Played by La Vuelta Ensemble’s cofounder, Jean Carlos Claudio, and directed/cocreated by their fellow cofounder, Raquel Torre, this show has been a long time in the making. Claudio says, “In 2017, I had a bad injury that really set me back. I couldn’t do much of anything, circuswise, so I started writing ideas for performances I could do once I recovered.”

But the genesis of their company goes back even further. Claudio and Torre formed La Vuelta in 2014 and have performed many shows around North America, from Puerto Rico (their original home), to Argentina, before settling in Chicago. “Our artistic partnership actually precedes our romantic relationship. Jean Carlos and I became close friends and later partners while working together for a circus company back in Puerto Rico more than ten years ago. Then when we started La Vuelta . . . we would cocreate, codirect, and costar on almost everything,” explains Torre. 

The theater ensemble has a focus on physicality through clowning, acrobatics, and juggling. This creative duo has developed both together and independently through their ensemble work as well as through their separate studies and careers: Claudio as a graduate of the full-time circus program at the Actors Gymnasium, and Torre through her post-graduate work performing, directing, and choreographing around town (working with UrbanTheater Company, Filament Theatre, Shattered Globe Theatre, the Gift Theatre, Opera-Matic, and Rough House Theater). 

Torre describes the perks of working with her life partner in a professional capacity. “Because so much of Memorabilia is sourced from Jean Carlos’s life—for example, the melodica song, Bratsch’s ‘La Noce’, was the song Jean used to play during my mime act, way back in the day—it’s definitely a plus to know the performer intimately, especially for the vulnerable clown presence Jean Carlos has.”

But producing this show in their neighborhood of Humboldt Park is a dream that has been a long time in the making as well, she explains. “UTC has been one of our biggest supporters in Chicago . . . It’s the space we feel at home in and where it felt right to produce Memorabilia. As a Latinx-focused company, we share similar values and curiosities in terms of what it means to produce community-rooted work that is not euro-centered. We hope to perform Memorabilia in many places, but UTC will always be our home base.”

“La Vuelta” means to spin and twirl, to take a walk around, to return, and when Claudio is in character as their clown self, they do just that. They are that rare combination of a skilled clown and a powerful circus artist, able to balance these not necessarily opposing skills by vacillating with perfect timing between audience interactions, and acrobatic feats. 

Torre explains why she thinks circus works so well in Claudio’s performances. “In Memorabilia, circus also allows us to capture the fantastical element of our memories, in which we always imagine the past grander than it really was. Most of the circus elements in the show exist in the memories Salvador shares, so we don’t really know how much is 100 percent true. We all do that, retell stories bigger than they were.” Claudio does this with seemingly effortless appeal, striking a magical balance of just enough connection to convey their vulnerability and charisma, and just enough motion (hand balancing, tossing diabolo, acro dancing) to transport the audience to the rich inner world of Salvador. 

As the story unfolds, we learn more about Salvador’s life. He’s having trouble recalling some memories, for example. He gets a little turned around and confused fidgeting with his gadgets every day, and yet he’s lonely and relies on them to get by. It’s a bit heartbreaking to take that journey with him, but a poignant journey it is. Salvador means “savior” in Spanish, so Claudio made the connection between the character’s name and the action of saving memories: a connection inspired by the tragic loss of his own grandmother to Alzheimer’s.

“He’s afraid of losing his memories, so he wants to store them like you’d store objects you’re not actively using but think they might be useful later,” says Claudio. “The tragedy is that in his search to preserve, he’s actually damaging his brain and provoking more forgetting. And while he’s wanting to remember important memories, he’s also repressing other crucial ones.” 

It’s perhaps ironic for a show that explores the importance of human connection to come out of the isolation of the COVID-19 shutdown. But on opening night, the sold-out audience responded enthusiastically to the whimsical tragicomedy of La Vuelta’s Memorabilia. The company plans to tour the piece beginning in December after this short run at UTC’s Batey Urbano venue concludes Sunday.

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Like many of us, Salvador the inventor has a lot of gadgets. Instead of accessing TikTok with his smartphone, he has an admittedly more retro and cartoonlike system, featuring giant levers and light-bulb colander hats to go with his tape deck and phonographs. His aesthetic is steampunk hoarder melded with cottagecore quaintness, but the end result of his stuff is the same—it’s a place to store his memories. Salvador likes to relive certain aspects of his life, the beautiful moment of falling in love, the excitement of youth when you imagined you could save the world . . . but also the sadder moments, like the strain of a song at the edge of a memory, or the heartrending loss of one’s partner. 

MemorabiliaSat 11/19 7:30 PM and Sun 11/20 3:30 PM, BateyUrbano, 2620 W. Division, reservations through Brown Paper Tickets, $20

Played by La Vuelta Ensemble’s cofounder, Jean Carlos Claudio, and directed/cocreated by their fellow cofounder, Raquel Torre, this show has been a long time in the making. Claudio says, “In 2017, I had a bad injury that really set me back. I couldn’t do much of anything, circuswise, so I started writing ideas for performances I could do once I recovered.”

But the genesis of their company goes back even further. Claudio and Torre formed La Vuelta in 2014 and have performed many shows around North America, from Puerto Rico (their original home), to Argentina, before settling in Chicago. “Our artistic partnership actually precedes our romantic relationship. Jean Carlos and I became close friends and later partners while working together for a circus company back in Puerto Rico more than ten years ago. Then when we started La Vuelta . . . we would cocreate, codirect, and costar on almost everything,” explains Torre. 

The theater ensemble has a focus on physicality through clowning, acrobatics, and juggling. This creative duo has developed both together and independently through their ensemble work as well as through their separate studies and careers: Claudio as a graduate of the full-time circus program at the Actors Gymnasium, and Torre through her post-graduate work performing, directing, and choreographing around town (working with UrbanTheater Company, Filament Theatre, Shattered Globe Theatre, the Gift Theatre, Opera-Matic, and Rough House Theater). 

Torre describes the perks of working with her life partner in a professional capacity. “Because so much of Memorabilia is sourced from Jean Carlos’s life—for example, the melodica song, Bratsch’s ‘La Noce’, was the song Jean used to play during my mime act, way back in the day—it’s definitely a plus to know the performer intimately, especially for the vulnerable clown presence Jean Carlos has.”

But producing this show in their neighborhood of Humboldt Park is a dream that has been a long time in the making as well, she explains. “UTC has been one of our biggest supporters in Chicago . . . It’s the space we feel at home in and where it felt right to produce Memorabilia. As a Latinx-focused company, we share similar values and curiosities in terms of what it means to produce community-rooted work that is not euro-centered. We hope to perform Memorabilia in many places, but UTC will always be our home base.”

“La Vuelta” means to spin and twirl, to take a walk around, to return, and when Claudio is in character as their clown self, they do just that. They are that rare combination of a skilled clown and a powerful circus artist, able to balance these not necessarily opposing skills by vacillating with perfect timing between audience interactions, and acrobatic feats. 

Torre explains why she thinks circus works so well in Claudio’s performances. “In Memorabilia, circus also allows us to capture the fantastical element of our memories, in which we always imagine the past grander than it really was. Most of the circus elements in the show exist in the memories Salvador shares, so we don’t really know how much is 100 percent true. We all do that, retell stories bigger than they were.” Claudio does this with seemingly effortless appeal, striking a magical balance of just enough connection to convey their vulnerability and charisma, and just enough motion (hand balancing, tossing diabolo, acro dancing) to transport the audience to the rich inner world of Salvador. 

As the story unfolds, we learn more about Salvador’s life. He’s having trouble recalling some memories, for example. He gets a little turned around and confused fidgeting with his gadgets every day, and yet he’s lonely and relies on them to get by. It’s a bit heartbreaking to take that journey with him, but a poignant journey it is. Salvador means “savior” in Spanish, so Claudio made the connection between the character’s name and the action of saving memories: a connection inspired by the tragic loss of his own grandmother to Alzheimer’s.

“He’s afraid of losing his memories, so he wants to store them like you’d store objects you’re not actively using but think they might be useful later,” says Claudio. “The tragedy is that in his search to preserve, he’s actually damaging his brain and provoking more forgetting. And while he’s wanting to remember important memories, he’s also repressing other crucial ones.” 

It’s perhaps ironic for a show that explores the importance of human connection to come out of the isolation of the COVID-19 shutdown. But on opening night, the sold-out audience responded enthusiastically to the whimsical tragicomedy of La Vuelta’s Memorabilia. The company plans to tour the piece beginning in December after this short run at UTC’s Batey Urbano venue concludes Sunday.

Read More