Kin (Pat Metheny album)
album by Pat Metheny
Kin (stylized as KIN (←→)) is a studio album by American jazz guitarist Pat Metheny and his Unity Group, an expanded version of 2012's Unity Band, with multi-instrumentalist Giulio Carmassi and saxophonist Chris Potter. Kin was released in February 2014 by Nonesuch Records. It was recorded in June 2013 at MSR Studios in New York.
Background
Metheny has said that his idea behind Kin was to push the quartet-led concept that led to Unity Band further forward by adding more orchestration to the instrumental core of the band, so that Kin would be "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." The album also re-explores the concepts of world view, unity and the global village explored on previous Pat Metheny Group albums such as Letter from Home and We Live Here.
Reception
The reviewer Thom Jurek of AllMusic.com awarded the album 4 stars. Geoffrey Himes at JazzTimes wrote, "Melody writing is the most underrated skill in jazz today, perhaps because it's also the rarest. There are thousands of jazz musicians who congratulate themselves on writing in 7/4 and 9/4 and on shifting their solos from tonal to atonal and back again.
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Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q16998392. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2012, 2014 and 2013.
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This entry incorporates text from “Kin (Pat Metheny album)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.