Jon Gibson, a saxophonist and composer who played a foundational role in Minimalist music, died on Oct. 11 in Springfield, Mass. He was 80.

The cause was complications of a brain tumor, said his son, Jeremy Gibson, a musician with whom he frequently collaborated.

Jon Gibson, who also played flute and keyboards, was best known as a member of the Philip Glass Ensemble from its founding in 1968 until last year. He participated in the first performances of watershed Glass works like “Music in Twelve Parts” and “Einstein on the Beach” and performed with Mr. Glass around the world until health problems prompted his departure in 2019. His mastery of circular breathing and other techniques made him a crucial asset to the development of Mr. Glass’s sound.

“His technical abilities were beyond what anyone else was able to do,” Mr. Glass said in a phone interview, “and he brought everyone else around him up to his level. He was very gentle with everyone, and very generous.” Without Mr. Gibson, Mr. Glass added, “the music wouldn’t have grown in a certain way that it could grow.”

Mr. Gibson collaborated as well with the other three composers now recognized for establishing Minimalist music in the United States: He participated in the world premieres of Terry Riley’s “In C” and Steve Reich’s “Drumming,” and he was briefly a member of La Monte Young’s Theater of Eternal Music. An inveterate and eager collaborator, Mr. Gibson also worked with composers who had little or no connection to Minimalism, including Christian Wolff, Robert Ashley and Annea Lockwood.

As a composer, he pursued a panoramic span of disciplines, from unaccompanied saxophone performance and tape collage to fully staged opera. His most ambitious creations include “Voyage of the Beagle,” a music theater piece about Charles Darwin, which Mr. Gibson created with the director JoAnne Akalaitis from 1983 to 1987; and “Violet Fire,” an opera about the inventor Nikola Tesla, which was introduced in Belgrade in 2006 and staged at the Brooklyn Academy of Music the same year.

Dance was a constant interest for Mr. Gibson, who married an esteemed choreographer, dancer and teacher, Nancy Topf, in 1973. (She died in 1998 in a plane crash.) Mr. Gibson created works with her and with other renowned choreographers, including Merce Cunningham. A collaboration with Lucinda Childs produced several significant creations, including “Relative Calm,” an evening-length piece with lighting design by Robert Wilson, mounted at BAM in 1981.

Mr. Gibson’s own music reflected the economy of means and materials, and the frequent use of smooth, steady rhythms, common to the most prominent Minimalists. His compositions reflected the influence of visual art, including his own gridlike designs, and employed numerical permutations that he likened to those used in 17th-century English cathedral music.

Works like “Visitations” showed a looseness rooted in improvisation, reflecting Mr. Gibson’s enduring interest in jazz and Indian music. The gentle, organic murmurations of that piece, which employed recorded environmental sounds, made an impression among New Age devotees.

His music, the composer Britton Powell wrote in the introduction to an interview he conducted with Mr. Gibson for Bomb magazine, “evokes a sense of uncharted exoticism that invites the listener to spin the compass and follow.”

“His phrasing and textures,” he added, “float like smoke in the air — boundless, serpentine and weightless.”

Jon Charles Gibson was born in Los Angeles on March 11, 1940, to Charles and Muriel (Taylor) Gibson, both educators. He grew up in El Monte, a suburb. He pursued visual art starting in childhood, and an early interest in jazz performers like Paul Desmond, Chet Baker and Gerry Mulligan led him to take up the saxophone.

After his family relocated to Northern California, Mr. Gibson studied at Sacramento State University. He earned a bachelor’s degree at San Francisco State College (now San Francisco State University) in 1964.

At the University of California, Davis, he pursued a growing interest in avant-garde composers like John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen. He helped form an improvising group, the New Music Ensemble, which recorded two albums.

Moving to San Francisco, Mr. Gibson collaborated with Mr. Reich and Mr. Riley and came into contact with other Bay Area luminaries like Pauline Oliveros and Phil Lesh. He honed his jazz skills by studying with the saxophonist John Handy, and he studied South Indian vocal music at the Ali Akbar College of Music.

Mr. Gibson went to New York in 1966, and there Mr. Riley introduced him to Mr. Young; the two would work together until 1970. Mr. Gibson also resumed his collaboration with Mr. Reich, who wrote “Reed Phase” for him; it was Mr. Reich’s first piece applying phasing techniques to live performance.

Mr. Glass, after arriving in New York from Paris in 1967, was introduced to Mr. Gibson by Mr. Reich. Mr. Glass promptly recruited him for his new ensemble, sparking a partnership that would endure for more than a half-century.

Although he was steadily engaged with the Glass ensemble, Mr. Gibson presented his own music in New York throughout the 1970s, playing with fellow performing composers like Barbara Benary, Julius Eastman and Petr Kotik, as well as promising newcomers like the cellist Arthur Russell and the percussionist David Van Tieghem. “Songs & Melodies, 1973-1977,” an anthology of archival recordings recently issued on Superior Viaduct, offers a concise overview of Mr. Gibson’s sound during this vital period.

He married Cornelia (Nina) Winthrop in 2018. In addition to his son, she survives him, as does a sister, Luann Gibson Davis. He lived in the TriBeCa neighborhood of Manhattan.

Mr. Gibson’s oeuvre has been well served on recordings, including releases on three labels established by Mr. Glass: Chatham Square, Point Music and Orange Mountain Music. Recent reissues of his earliest music have helped to raise his profile for new listeners. So, too, did performances of “Visitations” in the United States and Europe in 2016 and 2017, for which Britton Powell assembled an ensemble that included Mr. Gibson’s son and members of the inventive electronic music group Forma.

“That was not an easy tour, by any standard,” Mr. Powell said in a phone interview. “We would play until 11 o’clock, have drinks until midnight, and then lobby call would be 4:30, 5 in the morning. He’d come out for drinks with us, and then we’d be hustling to the airport and he’d be running up the tarmac with us.

“That’s how spirited he was, how interested he was in sharing his music and the experience.”