Akiko Tsuruga, a jazz virtuoso known for creating a vast array of sonic textures on the Hammond B-3 organ, both in a prolific solo career and as a longtime collaborator with the saxophone master Lou Donaldson, died on Sept. 13 in Brooklyn. She was 58.

Her husband, the jazz trumpeter Joe Magnarelli, said she died in a hospital after a brief illness.

Ms. Tsuruga, who was born in Japan, carved out a distinctive place in the male-dominated American jazz world over the past quarter-century by using the majestic B-3 — with its two 61-note keyboards, bass pedals and drawbars for manipulating tonal shadings — to produce a sprawling palette of sounds.

“Sometimes it sounded like a meteor coming from outer space,” Mr. Magnarelli, who often performed with her, said in an interview. “Sometimes it was a Mack truck coming down Route 80 at 100 miles an hour. Sometimes it would be snowflakes.”

Beneath it all was a bluesy, funky feel. “Akiko Tsuruga immigrated to the United States from Japan in 2001,” the critic Howard Reich wrote in a Chicago Tribune review in 2012, “but sometimes she sounds almost as if she grew up on the South Side of Chicago.”

She released nine albums as a leader, starting with “Harlem Dreams” (2004), which featured the drummer Grady Tate, known for his work with Ella Fitzgerald and others, as well as the saxophonist and flutist Frank Wess, formerly of the Count Basie Orchestra.

In a review of the same 2012 concert in Chicago for DownBeat magazine, Hilary Brown wrote that Ms. Tsuruga “artfully straddles the line of picture-perfect restraint and no-holds-barred gut-busting as she churns out her own brand of bubbly B-3 soul-jazz.”

Ms. Tsuruga made her name playing with Mr. Donaldson, one of the pioneers of hard bop, who first saw her perform at Showman’s, a well-known Harlem club, in 2007.

“He said to me, ‘You’re better than any of the guys I know here in New York,’” Ms. Tsuruga recalled in an interview last year with Hot House, a New York jazz magazine.

Before long he invited her to join his band, and he became an invaluable tutor. “Lou said that I needed to learn how to comp behind horn players and that he was going to teach me,” she recalled in a recent interview with Flophouse, an online jazz magazine.

Their working relationship, which lasted until Mr. Donaldson’s death last year at 98, included tours around the globe.

Another mentor, Lonnie Smith, had preceded her as Mr. Donaldson’s organist. “Sometimes we played together,” she said of Mr. Smith in a 2018 interview with City, a culture magazine in Rochester, N.Y. “I realized there was a difference and I asked him, why was he different? He said it was rhythm, and he said, ‘Don’t just play, put your emotions into every note.’”

Ms. Tsuruga was born on Sept. 1, 1967, in Osaka. She was the eldest of three children of Koji and Hiroko (Kiyonaga) Tsuruga. Her father owned a manufacturing company.

She received an early musical education from a grandmother who was a jazz fan and began studying at a local Yamaha music school at 3. She got her first organ as a young child, and fell in love with the instrument instantly, even though, as she told Hot House last year, “I couldn’t reach the pedals, so I was playing the bass with my left hand and the chords and melody with my right hand.”

By her late teens Ms. Tsuruga was performing on both piano and organ at a lounge in Osaka. She eventually decided to focus on the organ.

After graduating from the Osaka College of Music in 1988, she honed her chops performing at a local jazz club, where visiting musicians like the trumpeter Roy Hargrove and Mr. Tate would drop in for sets that could go until the wee hours. Mr. Tate and others recommended that she move to New York to further her career.

During her years in the United States, Ms. Tsuruga returned to Japan multiple times on tours as a solo artist. She released her final album, “Beyond Nostalgia,” this year.

In addition to her husband, she is survived by her mother; her sister, Naomi; and her brother, Shingo.

In the 2018 interview, Ms. Tsuruga discussed how her switch from piano to organ allowed her career to blossom. “I felt that I could show my emotion more on the organ,” she said. “I want to play like a big band by myself.”