Vicente Rivero Irizarry was born on September 8, 1957 in East Harlem, to Elba Maria Irizarry of Guayanilla and Vicente Rivero Ortiz of Cataño, both Puerto Rican. He grew up in El Barrio with a brother and a sister, in a family that danced. His father promoted parties, and the boy learned the pachanga by watching, then the chachacha, the mambo and the guaracha, and was dancing on stage with working bands at the Manhattan Center, the Colgate Gardens, the Copacabana and the Palladium before he was a teenager. His father's record collection did the rest: Machito, Tito Rodriguez, Tito Puente, Johnny Pacheco, and alongside them Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers and Tony Bennett. The percussion came from the street. Rumberos gathered in Jefferson Park and on Randall's Island, and Rivero went to listen, learned a rhythm, took it home and worked at it for six or seven hours. There was no teacher. He started on bongo at ten and joined his school band. His father had begun calling him Pequeño Johnny during the dancing years, and the name stuck in both languages.

At fourteen he was hired by Gustavo Colon into Orquesta Colon, then the youngest Latin band in New York, and became its conga player. Three albums followed on Rico Records: Creepin' Up (1971), Adan Y Eva (Garden Of Eden) (1972), and Kikiriki (1974), the last credited to Gus Colon & Orchestra Colon, with Tony Pabon directing. In 1973 his parents moved back to Puerto Rico and he went with them, to Guayanilla. In 1974 Enrique "Quique" Lucca and his son Papo Lucca took him into La Sonora Ponceña, the Ponce band known as the Gigantes del Sur. He played bongos for about eighteen months, then moved to congas and stayed there. He was with the band for sixteen years and left in 1990. He puts the album count at eighteen; sixteen are individually documented, running from Tiene Pimienta (Inca, 1975) through Musical Conquest (1976), El Gigante Del Sur (1977), Explorando and La Orquesta De Mi Tierra (1978), Energized (1979), New Heights and Unchained Force (1980), Night Raider (1981), Determination (1982), Future (1984), Jubilee (1985), Back To Work (1987), On The Right Track (1988) and Into The 90's (1990), plus La Ceiba with Celia Cruz in 1979. His first recorded conga solo is on side A, track 4 of Unchained Force. He credits the Luccas less with teaching him rhythm than with teaching him how a professional behaves.

The 1990s were freelance years, largely in Puerto Rico and largely in salsa: Adalberto Santiago, Ismael Quintana, Cheo Feliciano, Frankie Ruiz, Bobby Valentin, Marvin Santiago, Tito Nieves and four records with Domingo Quiñones. A single 1992 date pointed somewhere else. Giovanni Hidalgo's Villa Hidalgo, made for the German label Messidor, put Rivero on claves behind Paquito D'Rivera on alto and David Sanchez on tenor for "Bahia San Juan", and the track was picked up three years later for the Nascente compilation Latin Jazz: Latino Heat Meets New York Cool. In 1997 he shared a stage with Jose Mangual, the bongo player he had grown up idolising, and the same year he moved back to New York. He has been direct about what that return did for him: it opened up the space he most wanted to play in, which was Latin jazz.

New York gave him Eddie Palmieri, whose band he joined around 2002 and has toured with ever since, through Europe, Africa, Asia, Russia, Japan and Hong Kong. It also gave him Brian Lynch, and the two Grammy albums. Simpatico, credited to The Brian Lynch/Eddie Palmieri Project (ArtistShare, 2006), with Rivero on bongos and campana among a band that included Phil Woods, Donald Harrison, Conrad Herwig, Hidalgo and Pedrito Martinez, won Best Latin Jazz Album at the 49th Grammy Awards on February 11, 2007. Thirteen years later the Brian Lynch Big Band's The Omni-American Book Club: My Journey Through Literature in Music, on which Rivero plays percussion on two tracks, won Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album at the 62nd Grammy Awards. That second one is the general jazz category, not a Latin one. Between and around them came Unsung Heroes (2010), Bolero Nights For Billie Holiday (2009) and the double album Madera Latino: A Latin Jazz Perspective on the Music of Woody Shaw (2016), all with Lynch, and three Palmieri albums in two years: Sabiduria (2017), Full Circle and Mi Luz Mayor (both 2018). He has called the Mi Luz Mayor session, with about thirty musicians playing at once, one of the most special things he has been part of.

He also turns up in jazz settings with nothing Latin about them. He is the conga player on the Dr. Lonnie Smith Octet's In The Beginning Volumes 1 & 2 (Pilgrimage, 2013), a soul-jazz and bop organ record, and on the drummer Ray Appleton's Indianapolis bebop date Naptown Legacy, cut in December 2010. He plays bongos and bells on "Under My Thumb (Puerto Rico)" from Tim Ries's Stones World. In 2014 he was brought in as the special guest on a swing quintet date, Harry Allen's For George, Cole and Duke (Blue Heron, released 2015), produced by Chuck Redd with Ehud Asherie on piano, where he adds congas, bongos and shekere to three of the thirteen tracks: Duke Ellington's "Purple Gazelle" and "Mood Indigo" and Cole Porter's "Love for Sale". A decade later he was still working that seam, guesting on Darryl Yokley's Sound Reformation's Un Mundo En Soledad (2024).

His own records started in his late forties and there are five. Pasos Gigantes (Rumba Jams, 2006) is a salsa and rumba album he wrote almost entirely himself, produced, and filled with guests including Papo Lucca, Hidalgo and the violinist Alfredo de la Fe. Music In Me (Truth Revolution, August 2016) is the Latin jazz record, made with Brian Lynch, the alto saxophonist Louis Fouche, the brothers Zaccai and Luques Curtis and the drummer Ludwig Afonso, with Conrad Herwig guesting on trombone. Its nine tracks are all dedications: "Mr. LP" to Martin Cohen, the founder of Latin Percussion; "Palmieri, Much Respect" to his employer; "Little Giants" to La Sonora Ponceña. The New York City Jazz Record named it one of the best Latin albums of 2016 and the Fundacion Nacional para la Cultura Popular de Puerto Rico one of the best albums of the year. Golpe Duro (2020) and Mejor Que Nunca (2023), both made with the singer Anthony Almonte, a former student of his from a Bronx high school, go back to hard salsa. A sixth, Soy La Calle, is announced for 2027. He tours with Palmieri, leads his own band, and in August 2026 brought a group billed as Little Johnny Rivero & His Giants to the Morris Museum for a programme titled Tribute to our Legends of Jazz & Latin Jazz.

Rivero is a hand percussionist first, with the conga as the primary voice and bongos, bata, timbales, cajon, shekere and the Puerto Rican barril de bomba around it, and the range is the point: on his own records he will use ten or twelve instruments across a single album. What he learned in Jefferson Park was the discipline of clave, and his playing is built on it rather than on display. Raul Da Gama, reviewing Music In Me for Latin Jazz Network, described the solos as short but gripping, mixing authoritative strokes with angular figures and gentler passages, and noted a player who deserves more recognition than he has for what he has put into the Latin jazz literature. David Whiteis, writing on the same album in JazzTimes, heard percussion functioning as a lead voice rather than a floor. The influences he names are the older New York and Puerto Rican congueros: Jose Mangual, Little Ray Romero, Francisco Aguabella and Ray Barretto, with Machito, Tito Rodriguez, Tito Puente and Eddie Palmieri as the bands he grew up inside, and Art Blakey and Tony Bennett as the outliers in his father's record collection. He is unusual among salsa percussionists of his generation in having deliberately crossed into jazz in mid-career and stayed, and he treats the two as separate crafts rather than one blended one: Music In Me is a jazz record and Golpe Duro is a dance record, and he does not pretend otherwise. He has also gone looking outside both, studying with Cuban, Brazilian and African percussionists and saying plainly that the value is in learning a little of each culture and mixing it with his own.