Spending a half-century in the Canadian cultural industries is more a calling than a career. The man whom Harry Belafonte once touted as the best impresario in the world heard the call early and followed it, the rest of his life being fairly evenly divided between preserving folk culture and presenting artists for the public to enjoy.

Born Samuel Gesser, the son of Polish parents who established themselves in what was then the largely immigrant Plateau-Mont-Royal neighbourhood in Montreal, he trained as a commercial artist and worked in visual arts for several years. However, his passion was for folklore, particularly the songs from his home province.

He travelled throughout Quebec in the late 1940s and early 1950s making field recordings of French Canadian fiddle tunes and folk songs, setting up his own record label, Allied Records. One of his many recordings featured six Montreal poets, among them a youthful Leonard Cohen.

An association with Folkways Records led to the US label releasing many of the recordings of Canadian folk artists preserved by Gesser and other song gatherers.

Turning his hand to concert promotion in 1953, Gesser brought Pete Seeger to Montreal and made $200 on the event, the beginning of the end of his commercial art career. Concert promotion began taking up more time and generating increased revenues. So did Les Feux Follets, a French

Canadian dance company that he founded the following year.

Gesser’s background and contacts in the folk world served him well when that music form exploded into widespread popularity as the 1950s gave way to the 1960s. He brought many of the biggest names in the genre to Montreal, often establishing long-term personal as well as professional friendships with the artists whom he presented.

A quiet, personable man in a business populated by more flamboyant personalities, Gesser began booking traditional and modern folk acts but soon widened his scope of operations. Named to head the entertainment for the Canadian pavilion at the Montreal World Exhibition in 1967, he presented more than 400 shows on the Expo-67 site. Three years later he filled the same function at the Osaka World Fair, exposing numerous unknown Canadian artists to an international audience for the first time.

Expanding his operations as an impresario, Gesser began booking bigger acts in larger venues, presenting acts that spanned the complete spectrum of popular entertainment. Belafonte, Joan Baez, Danny Kaye, Nana Mouskouri, Glenn Gould, Liberace, Janis Joplin, Maureen Forrester, Isaac Stern, the Peking Opera Company and the New York Philharmonic all played Montreal at his instigation. Many went on to tour Canada and the rest of the continent under his auspices.

A high-school classmate named Mordecai Richler became a lion of Canadian literature. When his The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, the tale of a Jewish Montreal boy on the make in the 1940s, premiered as a musical at the Edmonton Citadel theatre in 1984, it was a Gesser production.

Among his New York credits were Nana Mouskouri on Broadway in 1977 and The Passion of Narcisse Mondoux, performed both in French and English at the Apple Corps Theatre in 1989.

Also among his stage productions was Fineman’s Dictionary, which Gesser wrote and produced in 2000, seven years after he was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada for his contributions to Canadian culture.

He is survived by his wife, Ruth Huber, and a son and daughter from a previous marriage. Another daughter predeceased him.

Sam Gesser, OC, concert promoter, was born on January 7, 1930. He died of cancer on April 1, 2008, aged 78