Chicago’s Umphrey’s McGee is a band with at least two personalities. They like to play catchy melodic songs, and they like to jam out to parts unknown. And of course, they really love doing both those things at once.

So it makes sense that they’ve been pegged at different times as a jam band and a progressive rock band. “They’re two sides of the same coin, right?” says keyboardist Joel Cummins. “Those terms are both accurate, depending on which song you land on when you take a spin, and I love it that someone who doesn’t know our music might come to a show and hear five different things at once. To me it’s a best of both worlds situation — We can play these songs that have a lot of melody, and we can pick any point in the set to take a deep dive to more improvisational territory. It exercises both sides of the brain.”

The band’s largely maintained the same lineup since forming at the University of Notre Dame in 1997. The only two changes have been in the drummer’s chair; founder Mike Mirro died in 2014 and the latest drummer Scotty Zwang joined last August. “It’s such a huge part of improvisational music to understand what someone else is playing and respond to that in a really quick way,” Cummins says. “The masters of improvisation have that down to a matter of microseconds.”

The experiments continued on their latest album, “Blueprints,” which was made in a unique way. First they played a special event where they asked fans to make requests — not for songs, but for specific improvisational bits that came off live tapes. The band re-learned those bits and performed them; then they took those tapes, stitched the pieces together and wrote new songs around them, all side-long epics.

“We were questioning ourselves a little bit when we went into it —like ‘Are these songs good and do fans really like them, or are they just enjoying being part of the creative process?’ It really feels like our jam record, since most of our studio versions aren’t trying to be long winded, epic statements.”

Does that mean they’ll go even further out next time around? “Not necessarily, because when we do an album we always ask, ‘How can we make this different from what we just did?’ I’m real excited about a new batch of stuff we’re working on — it has a progressive edge, but we’re getting back to doing six or eight minute songs instead of 20.”

Unexpected cover songs are also a part of the live mix. And it seems they’ve lately been in an ‘80s mood, as Sade’s “Smooth Operator,” Corey Hart’s “Sunglasses at Night” and Hall & Oates’ “I Can’t Go for That (No Can Do)” have all shown up in recent weeks.

“We’re always looking for covers that people will know, but haven’t been beaten over the head with by FM radio. We were one of the first bands to cover Toto back in the day — We did ‘Africa’ and ‘Rosanna,’ and I hope we get to ‘Hold the Line’ sometime. We weren’t doing it ironically, we really do love these songs — Maybe there’s a little bit of a wink, but that’s maybe two percent of it.”

Some covers are of course easier to learn than others. “We learned ‘Song 2’ by Blur in one day, but ‘Senor Mouse’ by Chick Corea—That one took a couple of months. Lately we’re busting out some covers we haven’t played in years — like ’Jesus is Just Alright’ by the Doobie Brothers, we had enough muscle memory for that one even though we hadn’t done it in about 2,400 shows.”

Umphrey’s McGee plays the House of Blues Feb. 12