Who wants a cookie?"

That was the gist of Chris Trapper's spiel to tourists years ago when he
was working for a cookie shop at an outdoor mall in Quincy, Mass.  Not
exactly a job with future prospects, and Trapper admits the job weighed
on him. Especially the night he sat down, after a particularly onerous
shift, to watch a Dixieland band perform.

"I sat and watched them play for five minutes and my entire mood just
shifted," he says. "I never forgot it, never forgot how they took me out
of my mood, out of the depression I had from working a crappy job."

Trapper, who plays at the Club Cafe Wednesday, bought a $5 cassette of
the band's music that night. Late last year the Push Stars' frontman tapped into that sound, releasing "Gone Again," which incorporates Dixieland jazz and ragtime with Trapper's pop sensibilities.  The result is an infectious sounds that's almost impossible to dislike.

"Dixieland jazz is the kind of music that has a natural joy to it," he
says. "It's not something you would listen to every day, but if you need
an instant shot of joy, that's it."

Trapper first experimented with the music when he was working on a cover of Steely Dan's "Bad Sneakers" with the Push Stars for the Peter and Bobby Farrelly movie, "Me, Myself & Irene."

"The song had a Latin-y feel, and I realized I wasn't a talented enough
lead guitar player to pull off the solo section," Trapper says.

Then he remembered the Dixieland tape that he bought years ago. Trapper called the number on the cassette only to find the band was defunct. But he did connect with John Clark, a Boston musician involved in that city's Dixieland scene, who introduced him to the Wolverine Jazz Band. The group was used on "Bad Sneakers" and he enlisted them again when he wrote the songs for "Gone Again."  The result is music that is simultaneously contemporary and evocative of another era.

"One of the things I love about music from the '30s, the '40s and the
'50s is that there were no real age boundaries in the pre-rock 'n' roll era,"
Trapper says. "Your grandmother would like the same songs you like. I
played a concert last week in Boston and some of the crowd was 60 and
up. That, to me, is refreshing in a business that is so streamlined about
what your demographic is. One of the first things you have to tell a label is something like 'Our target audience is women between the ages of 18 and 36.'"

Trapper says the purpose of "Gone Again" was to tear down any walls
between audiences, to not direct the music to any certain demographic.
He does, however, have to educate new fans a little -- at a recent show in Boston with the Wolverine Jazz Band, one attendee told Trapper he
expected more of a Kenny G. sound.

"When people talk about jazz they talk about something they flip by on
the radio dial and there's a knee-jerk reaction," Trapper says. "Unless
you're really into it, you just pass by it. But the kind of jazz the Wolverine
Jazz band plays was pop music in its day.  There's nothing about it that
is not poppy, not appealing or fun.  It's dance music."