The brilliant multi-instrumentalist and composer Hermeto Pascoal, who has died aged 89, beguiled the world with fusions of north-Brazilian rural music, jazz and contemporary-classical forms, and mimicry of all manner of forest and city sounds.

If ever a contemporary musician deserved to be called a force of nature, it was Pascoal. His music swept across languages and cultures as if all their differences had retreated in admiration at the universality of the sounds he made. He was fondly known in Brazil as “O Bruxo” – the Sorcerer. Pascoal’s Methuselah-like beard, tumult of white hair, and personal dialect of exultant shouts, cackles and coaxing gesticulations with his favourite hats, substantiated that title.

Music poured from him constantly. In 1996, he even devoted himself to composing a new piece every day for that leap year, when he wrote 366 songs for the book Calendário do Som (Calendar of Sound), so that everyone could have one of his songs specifically for their own birthday.

Pascoal regularly made the most structurally experimental musical conundrums sound self-evident, and his notions of melody – composed or free-improvised – never seemed far from a kind of a dialogue, whether it was animal, human, or the complementary sounds of wind through trees, or streams over rocks. He might open a gig with his band playing onstage, belatedly turn up in the venue’s stalls swapping vocal chants with nearby punters, bustle down to a keyboard, drift close to a Keith Jarrett-like jazz improvisation, and then, as it accelerated, begin to quiver and shake as if about to spontaneously combust – all the while sustaining a chatter of scat-singing, breezy whistling, even playful ditties blown into the spout of an old tea-kettle.

He was captured on film immersed in a lake in Brazil, sometimes burblingly playing the flute, totally submerged, sometimes eloquently rising out of the water. These were not affectations. Affinity with the sounds of performative humanity and nature at large filled Pascoal’s childhood in north-eastern Brazil, and he seems to have heard no reason to separate them.

Pascoal was born in the rural village of Olho d’Agua das Flores, in the coastal north Brazilian agricultural state of Alagoas. He and his brother José were albino, and their parents, Pascoal José da Costa and Vergelina Eulália da Oliveira, who were farmers in Lagoa da Canoa, had to shield them from the harsh daytime sunlight while the family worked in the fields. With time on their hands, Hermeto and José learned to play their father’s button-accordion, but Hermeto had already begun to relish the music in every kind of sound in his life – percussion on scrap metal in his grandfather’s yard, the sounds of mating frogs, waterfalls, birdsong mimicked by blowing into the whittled stems of castor-oil plants.

As children, he and José played accordion and percussion at local dances and weddings, and in 1950, when the family moved to the port city of Recife, they began to find work in radio-station house bands, where their playing contacts rapidly expanded. Encouraged by the celebrated Brazilian accordionist (and fellow albino) Sivuca, Hermeto added piano to his repertoire, and soon became a sought-after nightclub sideman in Recife and nearby João Pessoa.

In 1954, he met and married Ilza da Silva, niece of the mandolin player and composer Luperce Miranda. Moving to Rio de Janeiro in 1958, he played with the violinist Fafá Lemos and flautist Maestro Copinha, the latter soon to become a collaborator with João Gilberto and Antônio Carlos Jobim. Between 1961 and 1965 Pascoal taught himself saxophone and flute, and formed his own groups, including the bossa nova-influenced Sambrasa, which featured the young percussion prodigy Airto Moreira.

In 1966 in São Paulo, Moreira and the guitarists Theo de Barros and Heraldo do Monte, with Pascoal on flute, formed the shortlived but widely-admired Quarteto Novo. The group’s unusual mix of the rural north-eastern forró dance rhythms and modal melodies familiar to Pascoal – coupled with Moreira’s soundworld of homemade and indigenous instruments – was widely noticed within and beyond Brazil.

In 1967, Moreira and his wife, the vocalist Flora Purim, moved to Los Angeles to check out the newly emerging rock-influenced jazz-fusion scene, and in 1969 Pascoal joined them. Miles Davis recruited Moreira and Pascoal for his fiercely intense 1970 electric-jazz album Live-Evil, using three of the latter’s compositions.

He had wanted to use more, but Pascoal refused, saving them for his own 1970 debut album – the adventurously genre-bending, freely impressionistic Hermeto, produced by Moreira and Purim, and featuring North American jazz stars such as Ron Carter and Joe Farrell, with Googie Coppola joining Purim on atmospheric vocals. Pascoal designed his own chiming choir from 36 differently-tuned apple-juice bottles for the occasion, as well as playing keyboards and horns.

O Bruxo had his unique palette together by now. Chick Corea performed alongside him to great acclaim at the 1978 São Paulo jazz festival, and the next year Pascoal shared a stage on four piano/vocal duets with the vocalist Elis Regina at the Montreux jazz festival.

Back in Brazil, his and Ilza’s house in Rio de Janeiro became not only a family home but a musicians’ retreat and impromptu educational establishment, where Pascoal developed his own compositional system and teaching techniques. Various lineups of the Grupo Pascoal, evolved from those surroundings, took flight around the world, notably playing alongside Dizzy Gillespie’s touring band in 1979 and 1980.

In 1984, Pascoal recorded Lagoa da Canoa (a dedication to his lakeland birthplace), and began investigating symphonic forms with classical orchestras in São Paulo and Copenhagen. In the 1990s he and the Grupo Pascoal played concerts across Europe, and in the 2000s the Serious productions company in London launched a series of sold-out Pascoal collaborations, joining the ensemble with virtuoso-packed UK jazz big-bands, which the maestro reportedly hugely enjoyed.

Ilza died in 2000, but Pascoal kept their lifelong devotion to music-making alive on record and on tour until the end of his life. In 2002, he met the singer Aline Morena, whom he married the following year, and who became an energetic presence in his live shows, and a key figure in his last years, though they divorced in 2016. They released albums together and separately, and played in duo on Bodas de Latão (Brass Wedding) in 2010.

In 2017, Pascoal released two new albums, with his core ensemble and with a big band. His final album was dedicated to Ilza – Pra Você, Ilza (2024). One of his last live shows took place when he joined a raft of younger innovators at the DJ/producer Gilles Peterson’s We Out Here festival in Dorset in August 2025.

He told the Brazilian newspaper Folha de São Paulo last year, that “I was born music. I haven’t done anything without music.” His entire magnificent musical life was the testament to that.

Pascoal is survived by six children from his first marriage, Jorge, Fabio, Flávia, Fátima, Fabiula and Flávio, 13 grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren.

• Hermeto Pascoal Oliveira da Costa, musician, born 22 June 1936; died 13 September 2025