Roy Paci (Rosario Paci) was born on September 16, 1969 in Augusta, on the east coast of Sicily. He began on piano as a child and took up the trumpet at about ten, in his town's band. By the age of thirteen he was playing traditional Sicilian jazz in big bands and appearing in Italian clubs, a start that explains why a career later spread across ska, cumbia, reggae, Balkan brass and free improvisation keeps returning to the same horn and the same jazz habits of phrasing.

In 1990 he left for South America and spent time playing with an Argentine big band, with Uruguayan cumbia groups and with Brazilian ensembles. In Montevideo he formed a trio, T-Rio Blanco, and a later stay in Senegal brought him into a makossa group. Back in Italy he joined the ska band Persiana Jones, co-founded Qbeta, worked with Mau Mau, and formed the Banda Ionica with Fabio Barovero to record funeral marches of southern Italy. Alongside these came his first jazz records on another leader's dates: trumpet and flugelhorn for the Syracuse saxophonist Stefano Maltese on Sombra del Sur (Splasc(h), 1993), Book of Yesterday (Splasc(h), 1995), Voices in the Wind (Dischi della Quercia, 1995) and Seven Tracks for Tomorrow (Dischi della Quercia, 1997), the last two credited to Maltese with his As Sikilli Ensemble.

The late 1990s put him in the Italian improvising scene. He is credited on trumpet, flute, piano, violin and harmonica on Orbitale Trio Meets Hajjaj (Setola di Maiale, 1998), a free-improvisation record that Discogs files under free jazz. In 1999 he made The Mystic Revelation as one third of Trionacria, the trio with the alto saxophonist Gianni Gebbia and the drummer Francesco Cusa, with music credited to all three. Discogs also credits him on Bromio (1999) by the Roman band Zu, which Italian Wikipedia describes as a jazzcore group, and on records Zu made with the guitarist Eugene Chadbourne.

His own band, Roy Paci & Aretuska, was built from young Sicilian players, and its debut Baciamo le mani appeared in 2001. The mix was ska, reggae, Latin dance rhythms and Sicilian song around a brass front line. It found its audience in the same years that Paci was recording and touring with Manu Chao. His work with Chao began in 1999 and runs through Radio Bemba Sound System and the albums Próxima Estación: Esperanza (Virgin, 2001), Sibérie m'était contée (2004) and La Radiolina (2007). From 2001 he also played with the Dutch band The Ex, including its large Ex Orkest and later the brass group Brass Unbound, whose circle put him beside the saxophonists Mats Gustafsson and Ken Vandermark and the trombonist Wolter Wierbos.

Tuttapposto (Etnagigante / V2, 2003) carried a version of "Bésame mucho" that was used in a 2003 film by Leonardo Pieraccioni, and Paci received the Premio Carosone that year. Parola d'onore followed in 2005, and from 2005 Aretuska worked as the house band on Italian television shows. In the same period he scored for the cinema: he shared the Nastro d'Argento for best score in 2006 for La febbre, and Italian Wikipedia records a David di Donatello nomination for the same film. Suonoglobal (2007), Latinista (2010) and Valelapena (2017) are the later Aretuska albums, released through Etnagigante, the independent label he runs.

The more jazz-directed side of his catalog runs through CorLeone, his avant-jazz project about Sicily, which produced Wei-Wu-Wei (V2 / Etnagigante, 2005) and Blaccahénze (Etnagigante / Incipit, released February 4, 2013), the latter a record Discogs files as jazz and rock with free improvisation. From 2006 he toured with the American trumpeter Frank London and the Serbian brass-band leader Boban Marković in a three-trumpet show billed in Italy as Il Terrone, l'Ebreo e lo Zingaro. He played trumpet on Mike Patton's Mondo Cane (2010), appeared with The Ex and Brass Unbound on Enormous Door (2013), and in 2017 made Fight For Freedom: Tribute to Muhammad Ali (Etnagigante) with the composer and pianist Remo Anzovino, which Discogs files under jazz, classical and stage and screen.

In 2018 he took the Sanremo festival stage with Diodato for "Adesso," finishing eighth, and in 2023 he entered the Una voce per San Marino selection with "Tromba." In 2023 he also produced and arranged, and played trumpet on, Bandistikamente, a brass-band album credited to the trumpeter Giacomo Tantillo, with the pianist Fabio Giachino among the players. From February 19 to 22, 2026 he gave a world-premiere concert with the Orchestra Jazz Siciliana at the Real Teatro Santa Cecilia in Palermo, part of its Brass in Jazz 2025-26 programme. On February 27 he played trumpet and sang with Samurai Jay and Belén Rodríguez on Zucchero's "Baila morena" on the cover and duets night of the 2026 Sanremo festival. He released the single "Ritmo S'Alza" under the Roy Paci & Aretuska name in 2026, and as of November 2026 he remains an active performer.

Paci is a jazz-trained trumpeter and bandleader whose public identity is closer to Mediterranean ska and Latin dance music than to the jazz club. His Sicilian big-band apprenticeship, the trumpet and flugelhorn parts on Stefano Maltese's records, and his improvising work with Trionacria, Orbitale Trio, Brass Unbound and CorLeone are the documented jazz side of the career. The Aretuska records are another matter: they are built on ska backbeats, reggae, cumbia and salsa rhythms, Sicilian brass-band material and pop songwriting, with jazz present in the horn arrangements and the solos rather than in the repertoire. AllMusic files him under Pop/Rock and International, and Discogs lists his jazz-tagged releases next to many that are ska, reggae, folk and pop.

His reach comes from adaptability. He has played with Manu Chao's touring band, Balkan brass orchestras, a Dutch post-punk band, Italian rappers and a Sanremo pop singer, and he is also an arranger and producer of other people's records, as on Tantillo's Bandistikamente. The crossover is the point: one musician who moves between a free-improvisation trio, a festival ska band and a television studio.