Battle of the Blues Harps : Music: Two different paths lead harmonica players to tonight’s event. Perhaps the real competition is against the instrument, not the musicians.

In tonight’s Battle of the Blues Harps at Long Beach’s Golden Sails Hotel Crystal Ballroom, the battle won’t be so much between the blues-blowing participants as it will be between each player and his harmonica, according to the Mighty Flyers’ Rod Piazza.

Piazza--who will be showing his stuff along with Luke & the Locomotives, Johnny Dyer, (Bullit) Bill Tarsha & the Rocket 88s and Harmonica Fats & the Blues Players--maintains: “You really can’t compete with someone else on the harmonica. Some cats play things one way, and others a little different. I’ve always felt that the real competition was with the harp, with trying to master it. It’s like with golf, where you’re playing against the course.”

The Hohner Marine Band Harmonica used almost exclusively by blues players goes for about $18, a toy-store price compared to most of the instruments on a stage. But mastering it is anything but child’s play, Piazza said. “I guess there are musicians who don’t like harmonica, just because they think, ‘Well, I’ve labored so long to learn this real instrument, and here comes this guy with a harp and people are going for it more.’

“But in actuality, if you ever sit down and try to learn the harmonica it isn’t like a guitar where everything’s there for you, as a constant. You’re dealing with something that’s not really a precision instrument. They may be cheap, but you have to buy them all the time. It goes out on you; it goes flat; you have to buy new ones, and then the reeds stick right off the bat. You’re really on a fighting level just trying to have an instrument that will work for you, that will let you do what you’re capable of.

“And with blues, you’re not only learning how to play the instrument, but you’re pushing it beyond the bounds, making it do what it’s not designed to do.”

But bent to a player’s will, and thrust through a vintage Fender tube amplifier, the harmonica makes a mighty, compelling sound.

“You can’t measure the power of an instrument by how much it costs,” said Robert Lucas, the “Luke” of Luke and the Locomotives. “The harmonica has so much power, such an incredible tone, and it can be as expressive as a saxophone.”

Speaking in separate phone interviews this weekend, both bandleaders related a deep love for their instrument, though they arrived at that love by different paths.

Piazza was captivated by the blues when he was 6, hearing Little Walter and George (Harmonica) Smith on his older brothers’ records. By his late teens he was performing regularly on the L.A. blues scene, which, in the late ‘60s, meant getting to share a stage with such mentors as Smith.

The first time he saw the West Coast harmonica great, Piazza sat in with him on a couple of numbers. “Then about a month later, this was in ’67 or ‘68, I was opening a show for Howlin’ Wolf at the Ash Grove. I was playing a song and all of a sudden I heard the crowd brighten up, and I opened my eyes and there’s George standing on stage next to me, so this time I handed him the harp and he sat in with us.”

Smith was so taken with Piazza’s playing that he formed a band with the two of them playing harp. “I didn’t think he was serious, but then I got this call saying, ‘We’re gonna start tomorrow night--can you get a drummer?’ It was at a nightclub in Watts called the Sassy Kitten, with Pee Wee Crayton, Richard Innes and Lee Sklar in the band.”

Though at times he’s had to work factory jobs to make ends meet, Piazza has earned his living for well over a decade with the Mighty Flyers, which, along with being an O.C. club staple, is a festival headliner in Europe. They have a new album, “Blues in the Dark,” due in January on the Rounder-distributed Black Top label.

A generation younger than Piazza, Lucas learned his craft from records, with an interest in such blues-influenced groups as Cream and Big Brother & the Holding Company leading him back to the country blues of Robert Johnson. And unlike Piazza, the harmonica wasn’t his first love.

“Actually, I switched to harmonica when I was a teen-ager just because I was having such a hard time learning to play the guitar,” he said, “Once I started I really wanted to get good at it, so I’d buy the records of Little Walter, Sonny Boy Williamson, Walter Horton and George Smith, and I’d play along with them every day. I think Smith was a big influence on everyone out here.” (Similar to the Golden Sails event, there is a yearly George Smith Memorial Harmonica Blowdown held every year in L.A.)

Piazza said he was especially looking forward to tonight’s harp battle because it also features Johnny Dyer, another of Smith’s proteges.

“I’m always really happy to see the cat,” Piazza said, “because he’s really one of the few guys left who go way back in my past. Pee Wee Crayton, George Smith, T-Bone Walker--all those guys are dead. Johnny’s really one of the only links that tie me to all that stuff back then when I started with this music I love, and we’ve been real good friends.”

Not all harpist relations are as friendly, according to Lucas.

“It’s quite an ego-fight circuit, you know, so it’s kind of like everybody’s as cordial as can be, but some of the older guys who have been playing a long time feel they are God’s gift to the harp and the music. I get along with everybody, but there are people in the circuit who have real squabbles amongst each other. I’ve done these things before, where certain people (not the same lineup as tonight’s show) had to leave the dressing room because certain other people were coming in. You think it’s going to come to blows or something.

“I’m younger than those guys, so I’m a lot humbler when I’m around them because to me they’re all great. It’s ‘All you guys are king, that’s great.’ And I’m not so caught up in the harp specifically as in trying to be a good blues musician. I’ve got a whole different way of looking at it so that stuff doesn’t bother me.” (Lucas, by the way, has a solo album coming out in a month, along with a band album planned for next spring.)

Both he and Piazza believe that there is something in the sound of the harmonica that reaches people in a way few other instruments do.

“It’s hard to relate it to other things,” Piazza said, “But if you were a dirt-bike rider, I guess it would be like having that back wheel in a slide going around a corner, or the perfect wave for a surfer. That harmonica tone to me sounds just like the right thing. It’s perfect.”

Said Lucas: “It’s truly an American instrument--at least that’s how we relate to it, through country music and country blues. It’s really a part of our heritage growing up in the last century. It reminds you of things: You hear a harmonica playing and you’ll think of Louisiana or trains or something like that. It’s that kind of a colorful instrument. The minute you hear it, it draws you back.”