The two-year-old nonprofit Equinox Music Festival officially began its partnership with Dorchester’s Strand Theatre in a benefit concert at the Strand last Saturday night, June 14. The Strand is now Equinox’s official home, as it is for Equinox’s Boston Jazz Repertory Orchestra. The Saturday concert kicked off Equinox’s Keys of the City summer jazz series with performances by the BJRO and jazz giant (in all senses of the word) Randy Weston, as well as a presentation to Weston of the first Equinox Lifetime Achievement Award.

The BJRO features a generational and cultural cross section of some of the best players in town, directed by Carl Atkins and Bill Lowe. They played Atkins’s bustling arrangements of "Blue Monk," "A Night in Tunisia," and his Charlie Parker-based "Bebop Suite," as well as a brand-new Cecil Bridgewater arrangement of Weston’s classic "Hi-Fly."

But Weston was the big news. Resplendent in sky-blue draped shirt and trousers, skullcap and aviator shades, the Brooklyn-born Weston, now 77, accepted his award and heard proclamations read from the mayor and the Massachusetts House of Representatives. The stage was cleared and, after a pause, the sound of Weston’s piano emerged as the Strand’s heavy crimson curtains parted to reveal him dwarfing a Yamaha grand at the center of a fully lit, black-backed space.

He began with "Blue Moses," based on a traditional Moroccan tune, in a set that also included, among other pieces, "Blues for Elma Lewis," which he had performed with the Boston Pops in 1981; "Lagos," which commemorated his first trip to Nigeria in 1961 with a group that seemed to include every major African-American artist then living, from Langston Hughes to the dancer/choreographer Geoffrey Holder; his now standard "Little Niles," originally composed for his son, and finally Guy Warren’s "Mystery of Love," "my theme song," as Weston called it.

Weston favored firm, gentle left-hand ostinatos to support his blues-based melodies, Monkish cramped intervals, and dissonant chords, and West African zitherlike treble figures, contrasting deep bass rumbles with tinkling top-notes. He divided his performance into three-song sets, pausing to offer a commentary that amounted to an abbreviated autobiography — his jazz-mad youth in New York; his studies in Morocco; that first trip to Nigeria; his indebtedness to the venerable Boston educator and community activist Elma Lewis (who was in the audience); his belief in the spiritual grounding of African civilization. His father, he said, "gave me piano lessons, and he gave me Africa." The elemental power of Weston’s performance was hypnotic — playing half as many notes and half as many chords as jazz piano tyros half his age, Weston was half again as eloquent as any of them.

(The Keys of the City series at the Strand continues on June 25 with Yasko Kubota and the PowerJazz Trio; call 617-282-8000.)