Now a resident of New York City, thirty-nine-year-old Hector Martignon was born in Columbia. He comes from a musical family and began playing the piano as a young boy, ultimately leaving Columbia to study at the Hochschule Fuer Musik in Freiburg, Germany, where he received his Masters Degree in Classical Piano.

Hector listened to a variety of music in Columbia but developed a real interest in Jazz. Within a year of moving to New York in 1984, he joined Ray Barretto’s group and helped found Barretto’s New World Spirit. He has also performed with Gato Barberi, Steve Turre, and Paquito D’Rivera, both in Paquito’s Jazz Quintet and his Chamber Music Ensemble.

In 1988, Hector formed his own group, Foreign Affair, which features an exciting amalgam of Jazz improvisation and rhythms from Cuba, Latin America and Africa. The group serves as a showcase for Hectors composing and playing. He is both a clever composer whose music is filled with catchy twists and turns, and a technically clean and stylistically imaginative keyboardist who swings with equal facility and conviction either in or out of the clave beat