Roland van Straaten, who comes from a Swiss-Dutch family, was born and raised in Zurich, Switzerland. He spent some years of his childhood in the United States, Italy and Germany before studying music at Zurich's "Konservatorium", at the University of Zurich and at the "Conservatoire" in Geneva, where he worked under Hans-Ulrich Lehmann (composition), Yehosha Lakner (theory), and Spiro Thomatos and Maria-Livia Sao-Marcos (classical guitar). He has also been deeply inspired by his work with jazz, contemporary music, overtone singing and experimental theatre.
In his solo activities, however, it is the harmonica that has captured Straaten's artistic attention. Yet here, too, he has refused to be constrained by tradition, developing new playing techniques and collaborating on new variations of the instrument to free himself from its more conventional sounds and styles.
He has made solo appearances at various festivals in Europe, Israel and the United States. He has also composed pieces for the theatre, ballet, musicals and film, and has been featured in programmes on Swiss and Italian TV. Further collaborations have included the Checkerboard Blues Band, Andreas Vollenweider, Armin Brunner, Dodo Hug, Lorenz Keiser and Corin Curschellas.
Roland van Straaten has won various awards and distinctions, including the "Special Award for Outstanding Performance" at the First Harmonica World Festival held in Jersey, UK.

Cupping the hands has been an essential human gesture for thousands of years. Nomads have used it to draw water from a well; monks have used it to urge God's love into their hearts; Roland van Straaten uses it to ease his harmonica to smooth and vibrant life.
The harmonica, or blues harp, has long held a firm place in both African-American music and the European folk tradition. Straaten has taken this small metal object and fashioned it into a conduit of the passion and sensuality of oriental song. The secret of his success - in churches, festivals and concert halls - lies in the phenomenal range of expression he coaxes from an instrument that is still hugely underrated.
Roland van Straaten takes his audience on musical journeys from the Mississippi to the Ganges: dancing through Europe's bucolic idylls one moment, sinking into the groves of Zen monasteries the next. Not for nothing have some critics seen his work as one possible realisation of Stockhausen's dream of the "polyphony of styles".
However we choose to describe it: listening to Straaten is a moving and mystical experience. Because in Roland van Straaten's hands, the harmonica assumes its new and rightful place in the orchestra of the world.
Peter Stuecheli

A harmonica is easy to carry. Take it out of your hip pocket, knock it against your palm to shake out the dirt and pocket fuzz and bits of tobacco.
Now it's ready. You can do anything with a harmonica: thin reedy single tone, or chords, or melody with rhythm chords.
You can mould the music with curved hands, making it wail and cry like bagpipes, making it full and round like an organ, making it as sharp and bitter as the reed pipes of the hills. And you can play and put it back in your pocket. It is always with you, always in your pocket.
And as you play, you learn new tricks, new ways to mould the tone with your hands, to pinch the tone with your lips, and no one teaches you. You feel around sometimes alone in the shade at noon, sometimes in the tent door after supper when the women are washing up. Your foot taps gently on the ground. Your eyebrows rise and fall in rhythm.
And if you lose it or break it, why, it's no great loss. You can buy another for a quarter.
John Steinbeck: "The Grapes of Wrath"

PRESS REVIEW

A strangely beautiful sound - the rapt audience literally exploded into applause after his performance.
NATIONAL HARMONICA LEAGUE NEWS

How is it that so many people are willing to spend a whole evening listening to one instrument whose range of possibilities is generally held to be pretty much that of a triangle? Roland van Straaten, that's how. Straaten is a skilled entertainer with all the charisma of a gospel preacher. And an extraordinary technique that raises the modest harmonica to new heights of musical expression.
BERNER ZEITUNG

Roland van Straaten is a composer and harmonica virtuoso who inhabits the musical midlands between pop, jazz, classical and oriental styles. Straaten takes his harmonica or "blues harp" to new and virgin territory. His improvisations are mirrors of human passion, his music an emotional odyssey to the sources of the spirit, the essential, and the messages that music conveys.
EURO RSCG

In a process of initiation with sounds of an almost cultic dimension, Straaten's music decodes the secrets of the world.
BADENER TAGBLATT

The magic and the appeal of this small instrument are almost impossible to resist.
NEUE ZUERCHER ZEITUNG

Many, many people have already been to see, hear and experience him, to watch, listen, close their eyes and let him ferry them into other worlds, into themselves or far away. And it's not just his virtuoso musical skills; it's his phenomenal playing technique, too.
SMI BULLETIN

The whole effect is loaden with a powerful emotional sensitivity, even when the notes seem to seek a more spiritual dimension.
CORRIERE DEL TICINO

A strangely beautiful sound - the rapt audience literally exploded into applause after his performance.
NATIONAL HARMONICA LEAGUE NEWS

Categorise his style? No two people would agree, except on one thing: that they had never heard anything like it on a harmonica before. But if you really have to pigeonhole his work, then "music for the world" is probably the best description for this excellent, innovative, visionary (in harmonica terms) and above all captivating CD.
HARMONICA PLAYER