If there’s one contemporary ensemble that routinely reinvents the concept of jazz composition and orchestration, it’s the Willem Breuker Kollektief. This 10-piece band of crazy Dutchmen serves up a strange melange that incorporates much of the last 100 years of music, but which could have only been concocted by a brain trained to think from a postmodern jazz viewpoint. It made a rare appearance in America at Merkin Concert Hall Thursday night.

Mr. Breuker, who turns 61 this week, is regarded within the jazz world both as a serious figure and as a prankster – like Dave Brubeck and Spike Jones all in one. A composer and multiple reed player who specializes in soprano saxophone, Mr. Breuker was already a veteran of the burgeoning European avantgarde scene when he formed the first edition of the Kollektief in 1974. After 31 years and at least that many albums, his ensemble still includes two original members: bassist Arjen Gorter and trumpeter Boy Raaymakers.

At Merkin, the Kollektief played a single, unnamed work that lasted for roughly two hours and 15 minutes without an intermission or any kind of spoken interludes. The music was essentially composition-driven, but there was ample space for improvised solos by all 10 participants. At that length, you would expect the piece to follow a broad symphonic or suite form, but it sounded more like the soundtrack for some bizarre, unproduced silent film. (In general, Mr. Breuker’s music comes closer to making sense if you accept it as a species of circus theater.)

The work systematically addressed one genre after another, leaving Mr. Breuker’s interpretative stamp on each. The Kollektief started with a dark, heavy tone that suggested a Teutonic dance band of the 1930s playing a pop arrangement of Edvard Grieg, then cut to a melody suggestive of “And the Angels Sing,” rendered in a heavily syncopated style. The first soloist was Maarten van Norden, playing a rhythm-and-blues-flavored tenor sax.

Suddenly, the piece lost its jazz beat and took on the characteristics of classical music, with arco bass and the horns playing long, sustained notes and organ-like chords. The group then broke into a Latin tempo that suggested the Spaghetti Western music of Ennio Morricone; as Mr. Raaymakers crafted a mariachi solo that recalled the music of Perez Prado, the mood changed almost continually behind him. Next came an unaccompanied piano solo by Henk DeJonge, in which he referenced Art Tatum playing “Humoresque,” the adagio from “Rhapsody in Blue,” and Mozart’s “Minute Waltz” – all the while managing to formulate these excerpts into a coherent whole punctured by frightening whole arm thuds across the keyboard.

Other passages suggested the haunting, frozen chords of Bernard Hermann’s themes for Alfred Hitchcock; the light, frothy themes of Henry Mancini; the bittersweet, minor-key nostalgia of Nino Rota; and, of course, traditional jazz trademarks like Duke Ellington’s lush sonorities and Charles Mingus’s rollicking 6/8 tempos. Mr. Breuker himself took center stage near the end in an extroverted, unaccompanied solo that alternated between a hummable melody and something like animal noises; the climax was when he wandered through the aisles, blasting his soprano into the faces of unsuspecting audience members.

For an encore, the musicians played a short piece that would have been welcome either at a bar-mitzvah or at the circus. While the two trumpeters carried the melody, the three saxophonists danced around gaily and the two trombonists balanced their instruments vertically on their open palms. About the only things the musicians didn’t do was fly across the room suspended by wires, and I suspect Mr. Breuker is currently working on that.