Pat Metheny Unity Group, featuring Chris Potter on sax and bass clarinet, Metheny's longtime collaborator Antonio Sanchez on drums, Ben Williams on bass, and multi-instrumentalist Giulio Carmassi, fresh off a months-long European spring tour and an earlier US leg, kicks off a US summer tour featuring music from its debut album, Kin (←→), released this past February on Nonesuch Records. The tour begins at the Mondavi Center in Davis, California, Tuesday night, followed by stops throughout the state and region before heading to the Midwest and East Coast. The band is joined for most of the dates by special guest and platinum-selling artist Bruce Hornsby with Sonny Emory for what they've dubbed the Campfire Tour 2014. The Unity Group takes the tour to Asia this fall. See below for all of the currently scheduled tour dates; for additional details, visit nonesuch.com/on-tour.

Metheny says of this new Group, “The core quartet of Chris, Ben, Antonio, and me played more than 100 concerts over the year that followed the release of our Unity Band record. Over the course of that period, the band became one of those rare combinations of players where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts; it gelled in every way, and that just seemed to beg for expansion and further research.” He continues, “Simultaneously, I had been itching to write using more of a lush and orchestrated kind of concept that went beyond the sonic limits of what a straight-ahead quartet might invoke. But I really didn’t want to lose the energy, focus, and intensity of what this band had developed. I wanted to take it further. If the first Unity Band record was a thoughtful, black and white documentary of four musicians in a recording studio playing, this record is more like the Technicolor, IMAX version of what a band like this could be—but with that hardcore thing still sitting right in the middle of it all.”

To pick up a copy of Pat Metheny Unity Group's Kin (←→), head to iTunes or the Nonesuch Store, where CD and vinyl order include a free download of the complete album at checkout.

PAT METHENY UNITY GROUP ON TOUR

* w/Bruce Hornsby