His high forehead and long, bushy beard, suggestive of a country preacher or a backwoods boffin, offered an early sign that Garth Hudson, who has died aged 87, was bringing something different to the world of rock music in the 1960s. As the organist with the Hawks, who backed Bob Dylan on a famous series of concerts before turning into the Band, he looked and sounded like a figure from a different age, or perhaps one in whom many ages and cultures were being magically combined.

Music from Big Pink, the Band’s widely influential first album, released in 1968, bore witness to a process to which each of the five musicians – four Canadians and an American – made a distinctive and equal contribution. Levon Helm, the drummer, awakened memories of the old South. Robbie Robertson played guitar with a rare and pointed economy. Rick Danko, the bassist, evoked the intimacy of backporch music-making. Richard Manuel, the pianist, sang with an aching fragility. And Hudson, an enigmatic figure half-hidden behind his organ console, brought the sound of mystery.

An inveterate tinkerer with the technology at his disposal, Hudson used it to create sounds both ancient and modern. In concert, his lengthy improvised solo introduction to the song Chest Fever was an exploration of tonality and texture as wild as the freest jazz. On Acadian Driftwood (1975), the Band’s last masterpiece, he used accordion, piccolo and bagpipe chanter to conjure a lost world of fife and drum bands as it faded into history.

Hudson was born in Windsor, Ontario, to musical parents. His mother, Olive (nee Pentland), played the piano and sang. His father, Fred Hudson, a farm inspector, played drums, woodwind and piano. After the family moved to the town of London, between lakes Erie and Huron, Garth began the piano lessons that led to classical music studies at Medway high school and the University of Western Ontario, where he expressed his frustration over the restrictive curriculum by dropping out after a year.

Instead he began to play the saxophone with local rock’n’roll bands. But it was his acquisition of a Lowrey electric organ, which offered sounds very different from those of the more commonly used Hammond instrument, that gave his work an immediate distinctiveness.

In 1961 he was approached by the Arkansas singer Ronnie Hawkins, a favourite in Canadian clubs, to join his band, the Hawks, which already contained Helm, Manuel, Danko and Robertson. On the face of it, Hudson – three or four years older than any of them – was an unlikely addition, an incongruous figure in the rowdy bars where they played. “Garth looked jazz-musician cool, or like someone who hadn’t been out in broad daylight for ages,” Robertson wrote in his autobiography.

To a group of flash young rock’n’rollers, Hudson brought the very different experience of having played the organ in his uncle’s funeral parlour, and of horizons broadened by his knowledge of classical music and jazz. All of that turned out to be useful as they became Dylan’s accomplices on the worldwide tours in which the singer upset many of his old fans by reshaping his approach.

“This is American music,” Dylan told a restless element in the audience at the Royal Albert Hall in London one night in 1966, and a new blend of American music was what the Band were distilling as they worked together in a house called Big Pink outside Woodstock in upstate New York in 1967. With Dylan they made the informal recordings that would come to be known as the Basement Tapes. Without him they recorded an album that would profoundly alter the way many of their most famous contemporaries, including George Harrison and Eric Clapton, thought about music.

Music from Big Pink and their second album, titled The Band, brought them fame and success, showing how Hudson added unexpected but defining textures to the arrangements of songs such as I Shall Be Released and King Harvest (Will Surely Come). The audiences at their concerts marvelled at a group of musicians in perfect balance, leavening virtuosity with a modesty and dignity unfamiliar to rock and roll. Their versatility seemed infinite: just as Helm would strum a mandolin, Danko would tuck a fiddle under his chin or Manuel would move to the drums, so Hudson would occasionally hook up a saxophone for a brief but memorable solo.

By the time Martin Scorsese filmed them for The Last Waltz in 1976, they were being torn apart by internal disputes. Addictions had eroded their discipline and Robertson, the ambitious one, had assumed a greater organisational and creative role, opening a rift with Helm that was never closed. Without Robertson and his songwriting input, the Band reformed to tour and record in the 1980s, before the successive deaths of Manuel in 1986, Danko in 1999 and Helm in 2012.

Hudson released a solo album, The Sea to the North, in 2001; Live at the Wolf, a duo set with his wife, the actor and singer Maud Hudson, in 2005; and Garth Hudson Presents a Canadian Celebration of the Band, featuring Neil Young, the Cowboy Junkies, Mary Margaret O’Hara and others, in 2010. Greatly revered by his peers, he appeared as a guest on the recordings of many other artists, including Emmylou Harris and Leonard Cohen. Solo piano performances in later years revealed his mastery of a panoply of styles, from Professor Longhair’s New Orleans rhumboogie to Thelonious Monk’s twisted bebop, as well as a propensity for working entirely at his own pace.

In 1978, Hudson’s ranch in Malibu, which included a recording studio, was destroyed by wildfires. Later he went bankrupt several times. In 2013 a landlord sold the contents of a loft space in upstate New York which had been used for storage and on which rent had not been paid for seven years; the items included handwritten sheet music and an uncashed royalty cheque for $26,000 dating from 1979.

Maud, whom he married in the early 1970s and who became a frequent partner on stage, died in 2022.

• Eric Garth Hudson, musician, born 2 August 1937; died 21 January 2025