Click the link to read the obit on The New York Times website (Peter Applebome). Here’s an excerpt:
January 21, 2025
Garth Hudson, whose intricate swirls of Lowrey organ helped elevate the Band from rollicking juke-joint refugees into one of the most resonant and influential rock groups of the 1960s and ’70s, died on Tuesday in Woodstock, N.Y. He was 87 and the last surviving original member of the group…Mr. Hudson, Canadian-born, did far more than play the organ. A musical polymath whose work room at home included arcana like sheet music for century-old standards and hymns, he played almost anything — saxophone, accordion, synthesizers, trumpet, French horn, violin — in endless styles that could at various times be at home in a conservatory, a church, a carnival or a roadhouse.
He was the one who set up, installed and maintained the recording equipment in the pink ranch house in Saugerties, N.Y., where Bob Dylan and the Band recorded more than 100 songs that came to be known as the basement tapes…When the Band became a force on its own, he arranged the music on the group’s albums and painstakingly tweaked and honed its recordings. He added brass, woodwinds and eclectic flourishes that accentuated the group’s homespun authenticity, a quality that set it apart from the psychedelia and youthful posturing of the rock of its era.
Mr. Robertson, quoted in Barney Hoskyns’s 1993 book, “The Band: Across the Great Divide,” called him “far and away the most advanced musician in rock ’n’ roll.”
“He could just as easily have played with John Coltrane or the New York Symphony Orchestra as with us,” Mr. Robertson said.