Herbie Hancock, a celebrated jazz pianist and composer, has been selected as the Cultural Rhythms 2008 Artist of the Year, according to the Harvard Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations, which sponsors the event.

Hancock will be honored at the 23rd Annual Cultural Rhythms event this Saturday, which the Foundation says will feature some 30 student musical and dance performances over two shows. He will receive the Artist of the Year award at the opening show in Sanders Theatre.

Hancock has had a long and legendary musical career, recently capped by an Album of the Year Grammy Award for “River: The Joni Letters.” He has won 12 Grammys in total, as well as five MTV Awards.

“He was very popular in the 80’s, and his 2008 Grammy win shows he’s still very popular now,” said Matthew K. Clair ’09, co-director of this year’s first Cultural Rhythms show.

At age 11, Hancock embarked upon his musical career in a performance with the Chicago Symphony, and he has been a towering figure in jazz ever since.

He received a contract from Blue Note records in 1961, creating such albums as “Maiden Voyage” and “Speak Like a Child” that heavily influenced modern piano composition and improvisation.

Trumpeter Miles Davis recruited him as a sideman in 1963, and Hancock became a core member of what is known as Davis’s “second great quintet.” Through albums like “In A Silent Way” and “Filles de Kilimanjaro” the group fused the abstract, single-chord song forms of free jazz with the electric instruments of funk and rock, creating a sub-genre called “fusion” that held tremendous sway during the 1970s and 80s.

Hancock left Davis’ group in 1968 and began a long experimental relationship with funk music. This relationship reached its peak in 1973 with the album “Headhunters,” whose opener (“Chameleon”) and funk version of an earlier Hancock track (“Watermelon Man”) influenced R&B and hip hop artists for decades to come.

His 1983 mainstream single, “Rockit,” won a Grammy for best R&B instrumental and several MTV Awards for its robotics-centered video. Most recently, Hancock was featured in another music video, organized by Black Eyed Peas member Will.I.Am and supporting Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama.

Last year, actor Laurence Fishburne received the Cultural Rhythms Artist of the Year award. The money raised from this year’s annual day-long celebration will benefit the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, according to publicity from the Harvard Foundation.

—Staff writer Brittany M. Llewellyn can be reached at bllewell@fas.harvard.edu.