Andy González, one of the great bassists in Latin jazz, who in a career of more than four decades played with numerous influential groups — notably the Fort Apache Band, which he formed with his brother Jerry — died on Thursday in the Bronx. He was 69.

His sister, Eileen González-Altomari, said the causes were pneumonia and complications of diabetes.

Mr. González was a versatile player, as well as an arranger, composer, music historian and producer of other musicians’ records. He embraced African, Cuban and Puerto Rican styles, various strains of jazz and other influences, often merging them into something fresh. The Boston Globe once called him “a modernist preoccupied with tradition.”

He grew up in a musical household in the Bronx; he and Jerry, a trumpeter and percussionist who was 18 months older, would practice together in the basement. Their father, a vocalist in his own band in the 1950s and ’60s, was their earliest musical influence.

Mr. González played with the bands of the percussionist Ray Barretto and the pianist Eddie Palmieri as he was establishing himself. In 1974, he and the timbale player Manny Oquendo formed Conjunto Libre (the name was later shortened to Libre), a band that, mixing salsa and jazz, explored “an immensely varied body of folk, popular and experimental music, without ever losing its New York Latin feel,” as Robert Palmer put it in The New York Times in 1984.