By Kurt Gottschalk

Lou Kannenstine counts his son and his mailbox among the inspirations for his founding a record label. "My son always bugged me to do something with improvised music other than just listen to it," he said from his home in rural Vermont.

The daily walk down the driveway to his mailbox provided the name. After 21 years of tiny New York City mailboxes, Kannenstine moved to Vermont in 1980 and became a Rural Route Boxholder.

Kannenstine's 3-year-old label, Boxholder Records, is nearing two dozen releases, with new titles from Sonny Simmons and Bill Cole out this fall. The catalog includes discs from poets David Budbill and Eve Packer, horn heavies Joe McPhee, Raphe Malik and Ken Vandermark, seasoned masters Alan Silva, Noah Howard and Bobby Few and experimentalists like Paul Flaherty and Borah Bergman. He’s also put out a William Parker song cycle and a tribute to Texas songwriter Doug Sahm by Eugene Chadbourne.

At a time when more and more small labels are popping up, each defining its own take on the world of improvised music, Kannenstine could be said to be thinking outside the box.

"I really have no philosophy," the 64-year-old former book publisher said. "I'm just muddling along. It's always bothered me that I heard so much wonderful music that was just disappearing into the air."

He does, however, focus on what he terms "open form" music, a classification built from a lifetime of listening, from the so-called "race records" he bought in his youth in Texas to his early experiences listening to Spike Jones, Moondog and Harry Partch to his admiration for the music documented by European labels like Soul Note, Black Saint, hatART and FMP.

Boxholder just released a second recording by The Cosmosamatics, a lyrical quartet featuring Simmons, Michael Marcus, Curtis Lundy and Jay Rosen, following up the group’s first release (with William Parker on bass), which has been one of the label’s biggest sellers.

But big sellers, when you're recording underrecognized players, don’t always amount to big numbers. Boxholder's first release, Budbill's Zen Mountains/Zen Streets with William Parker, remains its biggest seller, and is only now approaching 1,000 units moved.

And the label, which was founded in part with money from the sale of his Countryman Press, is yet to break even, Kannenstine said. Except for part-time help from an accountant and a designer, Boxholder remains a one-man operation.

A second Budbill/Parker title, this time with drummer Hamid Drake, is planned for next year. Budbill, incidentally, should be added to the list of the label's initial motivators. After Countryman published several of Budbills books, the poet did a concert with Parker in Vermont. "He asked me if I had any idea who would be interested in releasing it and I said, 'Yeah, I would'," Kannenstine said.

A new disc by Bill Cole, previously documented on the excellent Boxholder title Duets & Solos Vol. 2 (with Parker, Cooper-Moore and Warren Smith) follows on the heels of the new Cosmosamatics release.

Recording double-reed master Cole is in keeping with Kannenstine's efforts to keep great music from "disappearing into the air." Cole has been "insufficiently documented for years," Kannenstine said. "I like the way he bridges the gap beween Eastern music and blues forms."

Cole's third Boxholder title, Seasoning the Green, is a suite with his Untempered Ensemble, which includes the players on Duets & Solos. The disc was recorded live in Burlington, VT. Kannenstine speaks highly of a growing scene in Vermont, with new venues and concert series in Burlington and Brattleboro. Along with plans to begin reissuing some early rare recordings - two Sackville titles, one by Joe McPhee and one by Wadada Leo Smith, are on the slate - he said he plans to document more of the burgeoning New England scene.

The new pulse to the north, however, doesn't make him miss the New York nightlife.

"I figure in the long run I will have heard a lot of music," he said. "I have to remind myself that there’s great gigs going on every night all over the world, so I’m missing things every living moment."

Bill Cole's Untempered Ensemble will perform on Oct. 11th at Carnegie Hall, and Untempered Ensemble member Cooper-Moore will be at Downtown Music Gallery on Oct. 27th.

This article first appeared in the October 2002 issue of All About Jazz: New York.