Alan James, who has died from a stroke at the age of 61, was a maverick concert programmer and manager with impressively eclectic taste who played an important role in promoting not only world music and British folk music, but anything from rock to jazz and ambient and chill-out styles.

His colourful career included a long association with Womad and the Big Chill festival, as well as key roles with the Arts Council and the English Folk Dance and Song Society (EFDSS). He was an erudite and humorous performer, known to festival crowds for his work as a DJ and an MC, and for years was the announcer on the main Womad stage.

Womad’s co-founder Peter Gabriel recalled James’s “passion for all the music he touched and all the love and support he showed for those that made it”. For the musician Simon Emmerson, of the Afro Celts and Imagined Village, he was “an unsung hero and cultural innovator”. According to the folk singer Shirley Collins, “he had a compelling presence – and you could trust everything he said”.

Born in Birmingham, Alan was the son of Donald James, a shipping freight manager, and Lily (nee Seel), a clerk. When he was 11 his family moved to Hagley, Worcestershire, because their house was demolished to make way for Spaghetti Junction. He attended King Edward VI grammar school in Stourbridge (the same school as one of his musical heroes, Robert Plant) and then Hull University. He gained a degree in politics at Hull, but it was the extra-curricular activities that changed his life.

He was already a passionate music fan and as social secretary at Hull he was responsible for booking bands to play there, at a time when the university circuit was an important route to musical success. The late 1970s was a time of enormous variety and change, and along with the prog-rockers Caravan James booked punk bands including the Damned, and folk stars such as Martin Carthy.

James became known both as a sharp dresser and a student who understood the whims and needs of musicians. These skills landed him his first paid job, as entertainment officer at ULU, the University of London Union, where students were treated to an extraordinary blend of music that ranged from John Martyn to Scritti Politti and the reggae bands Aswad and Misty in Roots.

One band that played at ULU was the Media, featuring Thomas Brooman, whom James had first met while at Hull. Brooman was working on a multimedia project involving global music and dance that would evolve into Womad, and James was invited to take time off from ULU and join in. His role was to look after the 15-piece African band the Drummers of Burundi, who appeared alongside Gabriel and Echo & the Bunnymen at the now famous, but financially disastrous, first Womad festival at Shepton Mallet, Somerset, in 1982. The band then performed across the UK, including at a memorable show in which they supported the Clash at Brixton Academy, with James working as their tour manager.

From then on, James took an increasingly important role at Womad, helping to programme the Womad at the ICA shows in London in 1983, and then the 1985 festival show at Mersea island in Essex, in which Womad proved it was back on track with a lineup that included New Order playing alongside the remarkable Pakistani qawwali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan – who had never played to such an audience before. “The crowd went crazy!” said Amanda Jones, the label manager at Real World, the record company started by Brooman and Gabriel, for which Khan would later record. “Alan understood putting diverse musical styles together.”

James quit ULU and moved to Bristol to join the Womad and Real World teams – while also appearing as a DJ with Karlo Smith in the Yu Fe Danse Sound System and hosting a local radio show. In the 90s he moved back to Birmingham to work with the Midlands Arts Centre, programming events in local parks.

As his musical taste expanded to include dance, ambient and electronica, he became involved in rescuing another major festival, the Big Chill, after becoming friends with its co-founder Pete Lawrence. According to Lawrence, James was there at the first festival, “an illegal party in the Black Mountains of Wales in 1995”, but after the event went bankrupt in its second year “it was Alan who got it together, chairing public meetings with creditors and supporters. Without his support and encouragement, the Big Chill would probably have ceased to exist.”

In 2001, he became head of contemporary music at Arts Council England. Noting the rebirth of the folk scene, he decided that this was an area that deserved Arts Council funding and provided the first regular folk grants. After seeing Collins discussing her book America Over the Water (2005) in a London bookshop, he thought she deserved an Arts Council grant to turn it into a theatre show, which toured in 2005. “He was looking at me with an intense gaze I’ve never seen before”, said Collins, “and he triggered the whole thing. I owe him a lot.”

Leaving the Arts Council in 2006, James began a freelance career, setting up his own management, tour production and consultancy company, Hold Tight. One of his proudest achievements was an improvised collaboration featuring the Bays band and the Heritage Orchestra, that toured the UK in 2008, packed the Festival Hall, and appeared twice at Womad.

In 2009 James joined the board of the EFDSS, later serving as its chair (2011-15). He also became chair of the Welsh Music Foundation and director of Cerdd Cymru: Music Wales. As a manager, he looked after two of Britain’s most adventurous folk-influenced bands, Spiro and the Welsh-language group 9Bach – both of which were signed to Real World Records.

James met his partner, Katherine Irving, a consultant rheumatologist whose wide-ranging taste in music matched his own, at a Big Chill event on the Greek island of Naxos in 2000.

He is survived by her, his mother and his brother, Richard.

• Alan James, music promoter and manager, born 9 April 1957; died 7 April 2019

• This article was amended on 22 April 2019 to correct Alan James’s date of birth from 8 April to 9 April.