Butch Baldassari Benefit

Musicians to perform Oct. 22 for Butch Baldassari; Performers include Dierks Bentley, Ricky Skaggs, Mark O'Connor 10-5-2007 Roots music singers and players will perform a benefit concert for mandolin player Butch Baldassari on Oct. 22. An all-star cast of roots music singers and players will perform a benefit concert for Butch Baldassari, a respected Nashville musician, record producer and adjunct associate professor of mandolin at Vanderbilt’s Blair School of Music, who is battling cancer. The lineup for the concert at the Martha Rivers Ingram Performing Arts Center at Blair includes Dierks Bentley, Shawn Camp, Kathy Chiavola, John Cowan, Bela Fleck, The Grascals, Tony McManus, the Nashville Bluegrass Band, the Nashville Mandolin Ensemble, Maura O’Connell with John Mock, Mark O’Connor, Ricky Skaggs and Three Ring Circle. The concert begins at 7 p.m. on Monday, Oct. 22. Tickets cost $50 and patron tickets will be sold for $125. All proceeds will go to Baldassari and his family. Baldassari has taught mandolin at Blair since 1996. He is a former member of the bands Weary Hearts and Lonesome Standard Time. His current projects include the Nashville Mandolin Ensemble, which he founded in 1991. “Butch is a fantastic mandolin player,” said Matt Combs, one of the concert organizers and adjunct instructor in fiddling at Blair. “This is a community where people band together for their friends who are hurting, so that’s what we’re doing.” Tickets for the show are being sold at Gruhn Guitars at 400 Broadway in downtown Nashville, and will be made available at www.mandolincafe.com. Online donations are being accepted at that Web site.