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As a kid, Nashville born-and-bred singer-songwriter Ben Bannister was surrounded on all sides by music.

His Grammy-winning father, acclaimed Christian music producer Brown Bannister, frequently brought his son to the studio, where it wasn’t a big deal to rub shoulders with such artists as Amy Grant, Debby Boone or Steve Wariner.

As a young man, interning and working at various A&R departments along Nashville’s Music Row, he thrived in the discovery of new music, seeking out new artists and sharing his discoveries with friends.

Now, as booking agent and promoter for The Square Room — downtown Knoxville’s newest live music venue, scheduled to open this weekend — he’s taking his enthusiasm and love to a whole new level.

“I was always in the studio growing up, hanging out and learning how records are made and getting to be a part of the innards of that process,” Bannister told The Daily Times this week. “In high school and college, doing internships in the A&R departments at these labels, what I loved abut music was listening out for the next best thing.

“It would always be kind of a game — finding new music and putting it on mix tapes and giving to my friends. I feel so blessed to be booking a venue like The Square Room, because now I get to share that with an entire city.”

The Square Room opens this weekend with a performance by chamber-pop group My Brightest Diamond, and the venue will hit the ground running — through next weekend, three other concerts are scheduled, and venue organizers are busy booking additional shows for the coming months.

Located in three adjacent buildings in downtown Knoxville — 4, 6 and 8 Market Square — the venue is part of an overall complex known as 4 Market Square. It started a year ago when members of Knoxville’s Haslam family, along with others in the Christian nonprofit group the Cornerstone Foundation, envisioned an arts and entertainment space that would be an unofficial “living room” for downtown Knoxville.

“The purpose of it was to create a really excellent gathering place in the center of the city,” Bannister said. “It’s a place for the entire community — where the arts can thrive, and a place to showcase local talent and draw in national talent. It’s an urban retreat — Café 4, the restaurant, is connected on the ground floor to The Square Room; and there’s an urban retreat — a loft where people can come in and chill, get on Wi-Fi and hang out for a few hours.

“There’s also a plan for an in-residence leadership program, a place to raise up the next level of leadership in Knoxville. We’re a taxable nonprofit, so we’re on a fair playing field, competitively, with other businesses, but any profit we do make pours back into the 501-C3 nonprofit, which is the entire building.”

In other words, there’s no single owner — no business mogul padding his or her pockets through a steady revenue stream. Money has to be made to keep the facility afloat, but the aim, according to Bannister, is an altruistic promotion of the arts in East Tennessee.

It’s not an inexpensive venture — at $6.5 million, the three buildings have been completely overhauled for upscale restaurant and a 450-person capacity concert venue, the two centerpieces of 4 Market Square. (There’s even a soundproof glass wall separating the two, so diners can observe the performances next door, which are broadcast over a state-of-the-art sound system.)

“I’ve been kind of referring to it as Knoxville’s missing music venue,” Bannister said. “If you look at venues as parents and artists as children, The Square Room — with room for 450 people — is really the missing parent in raising an artist through this market. There’s a big breach between the capacity of places like Preservation Pub or World Grotto or The Pilot Light and the next step up, which is the (800-seat) Bijou Theatre.

“Our hope is that we become kind of a pre-requisite to the Bijou. It’s a great-sized room that’s designed for the true appreciation of a performance. It’s a listening room, where you can have extremely intimate musical moments, but a place where you can also feel like you’re right there at a high-energy rock show.”

Bannister, who first moved to Knoxville in 2002 to attend the University of Tennessee, was brought on board by 4 Market Square’s executive director, Rick Kuhlman. After studying English and creative writing and honing his skills as a singer-songwriter in the local scene, Bannister had just about made up his mind to move back to Nashville and find work at a label.

Instead, he found himself getting a crash course in music promotion with AC Entertainment. First as an intern, later as an employee in the booking department of the Knoxville-based company that brings acts to The Tennessee and Bijou theaters (as well as one of the organizers behind massive Middle Tennessee music festival Bonnaroo), Bannister learned from the best, he said.

“At AC, they were incredibly helpful in teaching me bout the entertainment side of the business and how it’s run,” he said. “They gave me the tools and the knowledge in order to negotiate and buy talent and promote a show.”

Now, Bannister is one of 55 employees at 4 Market Square, and as one of two musicians on the management team — the other being local performer Brent Thompson, who’s the director of operations for the facility — he takes pride in putting the focus on music.

Thompson’s path to 4 Market Square was a providential one — he worked with the daughter of some of the backers at Stir Fry Cafe in Turkey Creek; the couple brought him on board based on their daughter’s recommendation and their impression of his foresight after seeking his opinion on the new venture. As director of operations, he wears a number of hats, bringing a business sense to the artistic side and a knowledge of restaurant management to Cafe 4.

“The whole facility is really a community house,” Thompson said. “There are multiple reasons for people to be here throughout the day, and the difference between it and other venues is that a ton of thought was put into the particulars of really serving the community. I think we have to come off as an authentic, downtown-centric, contemporary business model, and we’re doing a lot of things to accomplish that — we’re running a green kitchen, we’re cycling, we’re composting. We’re trying to pay attention to being a good, modern business in 2009 with world-class hospitality.”

The facility will be open from 8 a.m. until midnight, and with shows in The Square Room beginning at 8 p.m., it’s a venue that accommodates a working-class clientele that wants to see live music but can’t make the later start times at other venues jive well with a 9-to-5 job.

“We want people to think of this place as a concert venue,” Bannister said. “When I walked into it, they had a sort of generic idea of doing all sorts of things — dance and film and theater and music. My vision was that we should do one thing and do it with excellence — and if they wanted it to be music, I told them I thought I could help with that.

“The Square Room is definitely and solely a music venue, and Café 4 is a restaurant — and together, the entire complex is called 4 Market Square. It’s a very complex thing to describe, but that’s definitely how we want to portray ourselves. We’ve worked really hard to brand ourselves as a restaurant and, around the corner, music hall, and once you get into the space, you see how inter-connected they are.”