He brought Ukrainian music to N.L.'s mainstream. Now he's celebrating a 50-year career

Brian Cherwick's basement studio is a monument to his years lived through songs and stories. It's a treasure trove of instruments, some even of his own invention.

If the walls could talk, they'd probably sing. They hold up the posters of his previous concerts. Biographies of legendary artists and songbooks line the shelves. 

It's in that basement where Cherwick looks back through his 50-year music career. 

"It was kind of inevitable for me," he said, referring to when he first played piano as a child.

"My uncle was a professional musician and he sometimes would let me come listen to them rehearse."

His uncle's band took popular English songs and translated them to Ukrainian. Those songs got stuck in Cherwick's head. It snowballed from there, he said.

Cherwick is known these days for his role in The Kubasonics. It's "arguably Newfoundland's finest Ukrainian band," according to the band's website.

But his career before that is a winding road with many different musical genres along the way.

"I ended up going to music school at university," he said, sitting in his warmly lit home rehearsal space. "So learning classical music, I started learning jazz music, I played in a country band for a while, I played in a vaudeville comedy act."

He also sang with choirs in Winnipeg.

The multi-faceted musician and scholar has been revisiting all of those old tunes, preparing for an anniversary show with The Kubasonics set for Saturday at The Ship Pub in downtown St. John's.

His son, Jacob Cherwick, and daughter, Maria Cherwick, are also in the band.

"A lot of the music that we're playing is music that he wrote when I was a kid," said Maria Cherwick. "It's really fun to kind of revisit it again as an adult."

Some of the songs are completely new to Cherwick's family and musical partners.