Pedro Pablo "Pedrito" Martinez was born September 12, 1973, in the Cayo Hueso neighborhood of Old Havana, a few blocks from the Palacio de la Rumba theater and, by his own account, two doors down from batá master Jesús Pérez. His mother was a singer, and his maternal uncle, Antonio Campos (known in Havana as "Watusi"), was one of Cuba's most admired congueros. Martinez began performing at eleven, working through the folkloric ensembles Yoruba Andabo, Oba Ilu, and Los Muñequitos de Matanzas, and playing alongside the elder conguero Tata Guines while still a teenager. His godfather, Román Díaz, initiated him into both Santería and the Abakuá society, religious traditions whose batá rhythms and chants remain the foundation of everything Martinez plays.

Canadian bandleader Jane Bunnett heard him performing in Havana in 1996 and brought him to Montreal in 1998 to join her ensemble Spirit of Havana. He settled permanently in New York that fall. In 2000 he won first place in the inaugural Afro-Latin Hand Percussion category of the Thelonious Monk Institute's International Jazz Competition, held at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and that same year he appeared in Fernando Trueba's documentary Calle 54. He was a founding member of the Afro-Cuban/Afrobeat band Yerba Buena, recording President Alien (2003), which drew a Grammy nomination for Best Latin Rock, Urban or Alternative Album, and Island Life (2005), which reached No. 62 on Billboard's Top Latin Albums chart.

Through the 2000s Martinez built a sideman career that ran in parallel through jazz, Latin jazz, and Cuban folkloric music: percussion on Steve Coleman and Five Elements' Alternate Dimension Series I (2002) and, in the same decade, session work with saxophonist Yosvany Terry, a frequent collaborator dating to Terry's Metamorphosis (2005). He is on congas, bongos, cowbell, and coro throughout Simpático (2006), the ArtistShare album credited to the Brian Lynch/Eddie Palmieri Project, which won Best Latin Jazz Album at the 49th Grammy Awards. In 2005 he began a residency at the Manhattan restaurant Guantanamera that became the incubator for his own band, the Pedrito Martinez Group. Among the notable sideman credits from this period is Jason Lindner's Now Vs Now (2009, Anzic Records), on which Martinez sings and plays congas on "Far" alongside Anat Cohen, Mark Guiliana, and Kurt Rosenwinkel, a trio/quartet project led by Jason Lindner, Panagiotis Andreou, and Guiliana.

His own leader catalog arrived in force in 2013: Rumba de la Isla, a tribute to the flamenco singer Camarón de la Isla recorded with Román Díaz, and the self-titled debut of the Pedrito Martinez Group (Motema Records), produced by drummer Steve Gadd and featuring guest turns from Wynton Marsalis on trumpet and John Scofield on guitar. The album was nominated for a Grammy and named to NPR's and The Boston Globe's year-end best-of lists. He also appears that year on Omar Sosa's Eggun: The Afri-Lectric Experience, another Best Latin Jazz Album Grammy nominee, and on Concha Buika's La Noche Más Larga, nominated for the same category in 2014. Habana Dreams (2016), recorded partly in Cuba with guests including Rubén Blades, Isaac Delgado, Wynton Marsalis, and Angélique Kidjo, was named NPR critics' No. 1 Latin jazz album of the year. In September 2014, Martinez, Wynton Marsalis, and Chucho Valdés opened Jazz at Lincoln Center's season with the premiere of "Ochas," a suite for the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra and Afro-Cuban batá percussion that Marsalis wrote around Martinez's own Santería vocal and drumming tradition.

Martinez paired with pianist Alfredo Rodríguez for Duologue (2019, Mack Avenue), executive produced by Quincy Jones, and the same year guested on Medeski Scofield Martin & Wood's Juice, alongside John Medeski and John Scofield. In 2020 he recorded a new arrangement of Eric Clapton's "My Father's Eyes" with Clapton himself, later performing it live at Clapton's Crossroads Guitar Festival, and paired Clapton with Kenny Garrett on "Yo Sí Quiero." Both songs, plus guest turns from saxophonist Miguel Zenón and Clapton again, appear on his 2021 album Acertijos, which drew a Latin Grammy nomination. He guested on Kenny Garrett's Sounds From The Ancestors (2021) on its title track, and in 2026 co-produced Elipsis (GroundUP Music) with Antonio Sanchez, a studio trio project with bassist/producer Michael League built from improvised sessions at New York's Power Station. Martinez, an initiated Santería priest (Babalawo), has also crossed occasionally into pop and rock settings, recording or performing with Paul Simon and Sting among others, according to All About Jazz's own artist biography, well outside the Afro-Cuban and Latin jazz work that defines his catalog.

Martinez's playing is rooted entirely in Havana's Cayo Hueso rumba tradition and the liturgical batá drumming of Santería and Abakuá, both absorbed directly from elder practitioners rather than from records, and he carries that vocabulary, chanting in Yoruba while playing conga and batá, into settings ranging from small-group Latin jazz to big-band commissions. That grounding is what distinguishes him from percussionists who arrived at Afro-Cuban jazz through the genre's American recordings: critics and collaborators alike have singled him out as one of the few living conga players equally credible leading a rumba coro and sitting inside a working jazz rhythm section, a range reflected in a sideman list that runs from Steve Coleman's avant-garde M-Base group to Eddie Palmieri's Latin jazz orchestra to Wynton Marsalis's big band.