‘It has shifted the things that I believed music could do.’ Sixty years later, a creative juggernaut lives on

Douglas Ewart won’t stop creating.

Ground zero is a sprawling space on the second floor of a duplex Ewart owns with his wife, Janis, in south Minneapolis, which teems with inspirations stacked meticulously or haphazardly depending on their stage of development. There is a funhouse orchestra’s worth of the various wind and percussion instruments he has concocted, along with dozens of paintings, masks, some sculptures and a smattering of his handmade clothing.

Then there are the stacks of fuel: Recordings and books that pique, refine and document his broad swath of engagement, along with posters and other memorabilia of signal events gone by. The place is so suffused that it feels like a human beehive.

Amid this creative maelstrom, Ewart appropriately is best known for his longstanding me