Jeff Baumeister, jazz musician and Associate Professor of Music at Bucks County Community College, has released an album called “Pretty Melodies, For People Who Dig That Sort of Thing.”

The album’s eight tracks take you on a wild, yet somehow calming, adventure through a thick forest of highs and lows with every note played. It features piano, played by Baumeister himself, with Lenny Pierro on sax, Mark Pultorak on drums, and Paul Gehman on bass, all stitched together in gorgeous harmony.

The album’s beginning track, “From Here,” slowly draws you into Baumeister’s imaginative world. Tracks like “Blood,” and “Everything Is Nothing,” then bring a strong, robust flavor to the ears’ palette with an impregnable, steady tempo, clean execution, and jazz’s customary erratic undertones. The final track, “Leaving,” brings you slowly back down to a soft bit of earth from the adventure through Baumeister’s musical rabbit hole.

“Pretty Melodies” is a departure from its predecessor, “Useful Music;” a six track album that includes the same instruments, but an entirely different set of band members. Along with the alternate band members comes an alternate stylistic approach. The arrangements of “Useful Music” bring forth a much more precise and straightforward character than that of the warmer, free flow which “Pretty Melodies” radiates.

“Its meandering dissonance leaves me feeling like a Peanuts character. Like Charlie Brown, at any moment Lucy is going to snatch away the football, and I’m going to find myself laying on my back, staring longingly at the sky, wondering what just happened,” said John Corl, a former Bucks student. “It’s just that type of music.”

Baumeister’s talents have been thrown in with the likes of musicians such as Art Lande and Bobo Stenson, and his unique variety of musical mastery has been described as “conceptually complex.” All of this is clearly demonstrated in his most recent work.

Baumeister has received Jazz Performance degrees from William Patterson University and the University of the Arts, in addition to studying privately. He is currently Associate Professor of Music at Bucks, where he’s been teaching since 2003. He teaches 10 different music related courses. He is also the recipient of the Eubie Blake Scholarship and the Bernard Peiffer Jazz Piano Award for Excellence, Creativity, and Dedication to Jazz Piano.