THE PAKMAN

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Trombone as voice, built on a classical and jazz foundation sharpened over years spent late at jam sessions in the jazz clubs and music venues of Philly — always out, always on the scene, soaking up the lineage of musical culture. That jazz instinct, filtered through a deep love of R&B and early hip-hop, became something unmistakable: organic in form, soulful in intent, anchored by a trombone voice that leans in and confesses.

The real turning point came in 2021. After years of professional music success, an ayahuasca ceremony showed him something his career never could — who he actually was underneath all of it. That experience redirected his work for the future. What had been entertainment became service.

Then the music found a different room. In Colorado's psychedelic communities, sound meeting intention in ceremonial space revealed a new purpose. It started with a practical problem: a retreat needed six hours of music for a ceremony, and neither solo piano nor solo horns could carry that kind of arc. DJing the ceremony felt like the obvious answer — except no one seemed to be doing it. So he built the role from nothing, auditing thousands of songs in the healing music space and mapping tempo, key, instrumentation, and energetic direction to learn which tracks ground people into their bodies and which ones lift them out.

He shows up not as a performer working a room, but as a music curator reading one — mixing harmonically so keys never clash as tracks overlap, learning to sense when a ceremony needs rhythm to move people through stuck energy and when it needs silence to let something land. The trombone comes out when the room gets loud, when people are wailing through something — that's when a live horn fits naturally, adding a human voice to a moment that needs one.

He believes sound is the most underestimated piece of the sacred triad — set, setting, and the sonic dimension tying them together. Where most ceremonies rely on a static playlist or a live musician, he works as both, curating thousands of catalogued tracks while adding live trombone where the moment calls for it. That process is the subject of his book, Mental Realms, which documents the technical and spiritual sides of building ceremony music from scratch — and what it means to pioneer a role that is just beginning to grow.