Run Logan Run: Nature Will Take Care Of You

Although they often remain below the radar of the international jazz audience, British cities other than London support thriving jazz and beyond-jazz scenes, and the port of Bristol has a particularly fertile one. Among its luminaries are Run Logan Run, a duo comprising saxophonist Andrew Neil Hayes and drummer Matt Brown. Nature Will Take Care Of You, the group's fourth album, is the follow-up to 2021's For A Brief Moment We Could Smell The Flowers (Worm Discs) and it is another corker.

Bristolians will, one hopes, forgive the journalistic laziness of comparing Run Logan Run with better known London bands, but it gets us to our destination quickly: For A Brief Moment We Could Smell The Flowers was essentially a high-impact tenor saxophone and drums workout, a kind of feral cross between Binker Golding and Moses Boyd's esteemed Binker and Moses and Shabaka Hutchings's equally exalted The Comet Is Coming. As it happens, Comet's keyboard player, Danalogue the Conqueror, produced Run Logan Run's debut album, The Delicate Balance Of Terror (Weizen Baum), in 2017. Broadly speaking, Nature Will Take Care Of You is more of the same but with a greater emphasis on melody. It is also painted on a larger canvas than its immediate predecessor, with a palette which includes a brass trio and a string quartet on five of the eight tracks and vocals on three of them.

Hayes and Brown are the twin centres of attention, but for much of the time the new album can also be approached as a big band affair, or something close to one. Amongst its references, Hayes points to Archie Shepp's Attica Blues (Impulse!, 1972), Fire! Orchestra's Enter (Rune Grammophon, 2014), and the Nat Adderley septet's Soul Zodiac (Capitol, 1972), which was co-produced by soul/jazz/rock pioneer David Axelrod and Nat's brother, Cannonball. Certainly, Axelrod's visceral riffs and use of space combine winningly with Shepp's rough-hewn melodicism and the apocalyptic grooves of Fire! Orchestra.

While the dial on Nature Will Take Care Of You is often turned up to eleven, and gloriously so, the album covers a broad emotional spectrum, wider than the earlier discs. The result is a more rounded and nuanced listening experience, jazz-rock at its best, and Run Logan Run's most well-realised album to date.