Vincent Ector grew up in South Philadelphia in a house where the music was already playing. His father was a pianist good enough that Barry Harris compared him to Bud Powell, and his mother Pat spent thirty years as a secretary at McDaniel Elementary School. When Ector was eight or nine his father started taking him to Dino's on Columbia Avenue to hear the organist Don Patterson with Bobby Durham on drums. That room, and the Philadelphia organ-trio tradition it belonged to, set the terms for everything Ector has done since.

Formal training began at nine through GAMP, the Girard Academic Music Program, a Philadelphia magnet school run by Jack Carr that brought in teaching assistants from Temple University and let Ector take classes at Temple while he was still in junior high. He studied privately with three drummers who each left a mark: Mickey Roker, who was his father's close friend, Ralph Peterson Jr., and Armand Santarelli. Ector spent much of his twenties in uniform, enlisting as a U.S. Army bandsman in 1985, going through the Army School of Music on-the-job training program at Fort Bliss, Texas, and serving six years as a percussionist in the U.S. Army Band, playing concert band, jazz combo, parades and change-of-command ceremonies and leaving as a corporal. He has said the versatility that assignment demanded is the reason he can play anything. He attended the University of Pennsylvania from 1990 to 1992 and later took a Bachelor of Music in music management and jazz performance at William Paterson University.

Ector came up on Philadelphia R&B and funk gigs and did not commit to jazz until he was nineteen or twenty. From 1994 he started shuttling between Philadelphia and New York, taking week-long engagements at Smalls and Bradley's, and eventually moved north for good. His own site lists trumpeter George Barron's Crossing the Rubicon (Norbar, 1993) as his first recording; the earliest session documented on Discogs is Charles Earland's Ready 'N Able, cut at Rudy Van Gelder's Englewood Cliffs studio on January 1, 1995 for Muse. Earland, the organist known as the Mighty Burner, became the central relationship of Ector's early career: Ector had been introduced to him through Earland's niece, who worked as the secretary at his pediatrician's office, and Earland kept calling him for gigs at rooms like Morgan's in Germantown. After Earland's death in 1999, Ector produced and played on the Charles Earland Tribute Band's Keepers of the Flame (HighNote, 2002), a session with Joey DeFrancesco, Pat Martino and Eric Alexander that also carried the first recording of Ector's own tune "South Philly Groove."

Alongside that, Ector built a freelance career that has now put him on more than fifty records. He held the drum chair on both of guitarist Jimmy Bruno's Concord live albums from Birdland, the 1997 date with Bobby Watson and the 1999 sequel with Scott Hamilton, and has recorded with organists Reuben Wilson, Akiko Tsuruga and Caesar Frazier, with singers Giacomo Gates and Gloria Lynne, with tenor saxophonist Houston Person, with pianist Stanley Cowell on Live at Keystone Korner Baltimore (SteepleChase, recorded October 2019) and with the Israeli oud player and guitarist Amos Hoffman on Back to the City (2015). As a performer he has worked with NEA Jazz Masters Freddie Hubbard, Randy Weston, James Moody, Slide Hampton, Jimmy Heath, Hank Jones, Ron Carter and Lou Donaldson, with Grover Washington Jr., Shirley Scott, Dr. Lonnie Smith, Claudio Roditi, Ravi Coltrane, Cecil Payne and Antonio Hart, and holds regular seats in the Dizzy Gillespie Alumni All-Stars and Big Band, the Charles Mingus Big Band and Orrin Evans's Captain Black Big Band.

His own leader catalog runs to five albums across twenty years. Rhythm Master, recorded at Bioya Studios in Paterson, New Jersey on February 27 and 28, 2002 and released on Blues Leaf in 2003, is a horn-heavy septet date with Eddie Henderson on trumpet, Jay Collins on saxophones and Ector adding djembe and sangba drums. Renewal of the Spirit (Mambo Maniacs, 2005) put Bobby Watson's alto in front of four Ector originals. Organatomy (American Showplace Music, 2013) is where he introduced the organ band that would define the rest of his work: Kyle Koehler on organ, Israeli guitarist Yotam Silberstein and alto saxophonist Bruce Williams, with Claudio Roditi and the percussionist Café guesting.

By 2019 the group had settled into the Organatomy Trio+, with Pat Bianchi on organ, Paul Bollenback on guitar (the plus sign in the name is his) and Williams on alto and soprano. Theme for Ms. P, named for Ector's mother and released June 21, 2019 on American Showplace Music, finished among the ten most requested albums of the year on SiriusXM's Real Jazz channel and was picked as Jazz Album of the Week by Philadelphia's WRTI. In January 2020 the band played a Friday night at the Side Door Jazz Club in Old Lyme, Connecticut, with Justin Jones subbing on alto for Williams, who was recovering from surgery. Club owner Ken Kitchings asked to record the show; the pandemic shut everything down weeks later, and when Ector finally listened back he found a release-quality tape that needed no overdubs and only light trimming for length. Joey DeFrancesco urged him to put it out. Live @ The Side Door appeared on Cabo-Verde Records on March 17, 2023, dedicated to DeFrancesco, who had passed away the previous August, and landed on the Patriot Ledger's list of the best albums of 2023.

Ector is a lecturer in jazz percussion at Princeton University and has worked as a clinician at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Lincoln University, Texas Tech and the Belgrade Jazz Festival. He founded Arts For Kids Inc. with his wife Karen, a not-for-profit arts-in-education company that places professional teaching artists in schools across New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, and he serves as its president and executive director; the model came directly from what Jack Carr had built at GAMP. He has also taught with NJPAC's Jazz For Teens and worked as an artist-in-residence through the Center for Arts Education in New York and Arts Horizons in Englewood, New Jersey, much of it in special-needs districts of the New York City public schools. His awards include multiple ASCAP Plus Awards, a New York City Council Citation, a New Jersey State Council on the Arts Teaching Artist designation and a Puffin Foundation Artist Grant.

Ector is an organ-band drummer in the specific Philadelphia sense: the job is to make a Hammond B-3 swing and to keep a shuffle honest, and his time is built for that rather than for pyrotechnics. Jazz Weekly's George W. Harris described him simply as "crisp and clear," and the Jazz Journal review of Theme for Ms. P traced the whole aesthetic back to the fact that his first record as a sideman was made under Charles Earland's leadership. The lineage he draws on is local and direct: Don Patterson and Bobby Durham heard from a bar stool as a child, Mickey Roker as a family friend and teacher, Earland as an employer. Because Philadelphia players had to cover R&B, funk and soul to work, Ector treats a Major Harris soul single, a Burt Bacharach show tune, a Benny Carter ballad and a Dizzy Gillespie line as equally available material, and his own compositions ("South Philly Groove," "Dex Blues," "Renewal Revisited") are written in that same mid-1960s soul-jazz and hard-bop register. He is also a hand-percussionist, playing djembe and sangba on his own dates.