NEW YORK — At first glance it might seem strange that a klezmer band — and a Canadian one at that — would play a festival devoted to quintessentially American music, as the Flying Bulgar Klezmer Band did on Saturday as part of the Bell Atlantic Jazz Festival.

But, as the sextet demonstrated at the uptown club Makor, the booking actually makes sense. The Flying Bulgar Klezmer Band are among the quirkier and more rocking klezmer groups around. With the equally eccentric New Orleans Klezmer All-Stars and Boston combo Naftule's Dream, they share a tendency to use klezmer as a springboard to musical explorations with swinging rhythms and a jazzlike tendency to go practically anywhere.

The group's focal point is vocalist/saxophonist Dave Wall, who delivers Yiddish lyrics and surprising melodic twists in a voice reminiscent of the Klezmatics' Loren Sklamberg, all the while interacting playfully with the rest of the band.

The centerpiece of the show was "Tsirkus," the title track of the sextet's recent release on the Traditional Crossroads label. The lyrics depict a high-wire walker's perverse desire to plunge onto the knives below her. The band rocked this tune like Jewish Rolling Stones, communicating the song's dark emotional undertow with not-quite-kosher abandon.

The single unmistakable jazz gesture was pianist Marilyn Freedman's avant-garde jazz rendition of the traditional klezmer tune "Rebns Tants." Her breathtaking performance silenced the clinking glasses, momentarily interrupting patrons' conversations and extramusical concerns.

The show was not all high-wire fusion, though; the band also connected with klezmer's roots, throwing in a few old-time freylekhs (Eastern European group-dance music) that had the crowd on its feet. With clarinet wailing and the bass pumping up drummer Daniel Barnes's beat, the Bulgars sounded like Borscht Belt ghosts who'd flown in from some '40s Catskills bandstand.

They couldn't quite pull off this routine with a straight face, though, and the down-home klezmer eventually morphed into a salsa-inspired riff. Soon patrons of all ages were up and shaking their hips as if they were in New York's hottest Latin disco. And for a moment, in a strange Canadian-klezmer way, they were.