A Grammy award probably doesn’t mean much when you’ve got 19 of them lining the mantelpiece, but Pat Metheny’s 20th, for his 2012 release, Unity Band, was still a welcome validation of his decision to record with saxophone for the first time since the early 1980s. It’s not like he needed the praise, however. The positive feedback he’d already received from reedman Chris Potter, bassist Ben Williams, and drummer Antonio Sanchez was proof enough that he was onto something good.

“People liked it and we got a bunch of gigs,” Metheny recalls, on the line from New York City. “But the thing was, as the tour went on we all just had a blast together, on and off the bandstand. It was one of those rare things where everybody was just having a great time. And as it was wrapping up, it was almost unspoken, like, ‘Let’s do this again! Let’s keep this going!’ ”

That’s exactly what Metheny and company have done, although the Unity Band has now morphed into the Unity Group with the addition of Italian multi-instrumentalist Giulio Carmassi. And the new quintet’s debut, Kin (<– –>), goes even further, folding the guitarist’s computer-controlled Orchestrion into the mix in such a subtle way that it’s hard to tell where the live musicians leave off and the robots begin.

“Most of the time, when people have a successful record, they just go back and do that record again,” Metheny notes. “And I thought, ‘Well, let’s not do that. If we’re going to do this again, what else can we do?’

“I mean, I’ve always liked the Beatles: every record’s a completely different thing,” he continues. “And I thought ‘Well, to a certain degree, I’ve kept all my interests separate from each other. But why can’t all of those things coexist?’ I knew that the guys would be game for that, but I also knew that I needed at least one other musician. I didn’t need another soloist; I just needed a really good musician to play parts and stuff. Giulio was somebody [CBS Orchestra bassist] Will Lee had introduced to me, and he seemed to fit that role perfectly. So I kind of had that palette to work with, the destination being this tour that we’re about to launch.”

Said tour, with 44 dates in North America alone, is daunting enough in itself. But the music Metheny’s come up with for the new lineup is arguably the most complex of his career, not only because it calls for the seamless integration of robotic and human players, but also because it finds the bandleader looking back at his influences while trying to find new pathways into the future.

“I’m kind of at the point where, yes, I can talk about Wes Montgomery and Miles [Davis] and Gary Burton, all the people who were really the most formative people for me,” Metheny says. “But I also hear guitar players all the time that sound exactly like me, now. That is kind of out there, and of course that’s the way it works. There’s this continuum, this chronology. When we think about ancestry or kin we think about our grandparents and great-grandparents, and then maybe some caveman somewhere. But actually we’re the ancestors for people who are going to be on the planet two or three hundred years from now.

“And I think there’s a musical version of that,” he adds. “I mean, there’s this sort of tribal kin that happens within the syntax of music, too. It’s not even about a style of music, or it’s not about ‘jazz’; it’s about how all of these things connect.”

Puzzling out those connections is a particularly enjoyable aspect of listening to Kin (<– –>). On first encountering the title track, some have detected a Daft Punk influence, probably because the Orchestrion parts sound like sequenced electronica even though they’re played on computer-controlled acoustic instruments. But the horn lines, shared between Potter on sax and Carmassi on trumpet, are also reminiscent of Carla Bley’s writing—a more predictable link, perhaps, because Metheny’s international recording debut was with Gary Burton on the all-Bley program Dreams So Real.

Other parallels can be drawn with the bebop language of Thelonious Monk and Charlie Parker, especially audible on the brief palate-cleanser “Genealogy”, and to the political folk of Ani DiFranco—at least on the suggestively titled “Rise Up”, which starts out with fast, percussive acoustic-guitar strumming.

“Well, no one else has used that reference before,” Metheny says, sounding both amused and intrigued. “But I dig her, so that’s great!

“As for the political aspect of being a musician, of playing in a way that is not built on the conventional rise and fall of the culture, that’s a whole other chapter in itself,” he continues. “We’re all trying our best to illuminate what we believe in, and it’s quite different than this sort of American Idol culture that we live in. So on one level, the political aspect is there. But I wouldn’t say it’s just that tune; I’d say it’s all of it.”