Partnership Based on Shades of Blues : Pop music: Duke Robillard will speak John Hammond’s Delta language Saturday in Santa Ana, but he’s also fluent in rock and jazz.

When Duke Robillard and John Hammond take the stage together Saturday night at the Galaxy Concert Theatre in Santa Ana, they will be sharing the fruits of a blues partnership nearly 30 years in the making.

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Robillard, 46, was a Rhode Island schoolboy when he came across early albums by Hammond, one of the first white players to plunge freely and fully into traditional blues.

“When I first started listening to the blues in the mid-’60s, he was one of the first people that friends of mine had turned me on to, and that I really liked,” Robillard recalled last week from a motel room in Houston. Those early encounters with Hammond’s records led Robillard to Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and the rest.

But Robillard wasn’t one of those musicians who finds a single style that’s a perfect fit and is content to wear nothing else for the rest of his life, like a favorite cut of suit or brand of shoe. As he delved into the blues, he didn’t renounce his love for the ‘50s rock ‘n’ roll of Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly and Fats Domino that had enthralled him from age 7. As time went on, Robillard immersed himself in swinging big band jazz as well.

When he emerged as a player in his own right, it was as the founder of Roomful of Blues, a band whose name told only part of the story. Roomful--still a going concern on the club circuit--incorporated jumping, horn-driven big band swing Oelements and rock ‘n’ roll along with blues.

As perhaps befits a New England Yankee--albeit one who now lives in his wife’s hometown of Louisville, Ky.--Robillard habitually has worn a tricornered hat-ful of styles as a guitarist comfortable in three genres.

He said his friendship with Hammond dates from the 1970s, when Hammond turned up at a Roomful club gig on Block Island, off the New England coast. Their working partnership has developed over the past year as Hammond, best known as a solo, Delta-style blues act, has begun sharing occasional dates with Robillard and his band. Besides musical compatibility, the two have business links that helped bring them together: They are on the same record label, Pointblank, and the same agency books their concert dates.

On the bills they share, Robillard said, Hammond usually opens with a solo, acoustic set, then Robillard and his rhythm section, drummer Jeff McAllister and bassist Marty Ballou, do their show. Hammond, playing electric guitar and harmonica, then joins Robillard and his band for a closing set.

In a few weeks, Robillard said, the stage partnership will have a change of venue to the recording studio. Robillard and his band will back Hammond on his next album--on the numbers that call for a band--and Robillard will serve as co-producer with Hammond.

Robillard’s current album, “Temptation,” is his first on a major label in a solo career that started after he left Roomful of Blues in 1980. It slants toward the rock ‘n’ roll side of his musical personality, although the bluesy tinge is always there. Robillard said the material’s rock-oriented slant owes partly to the fact that he wrote a good deal of it during his 1990-92 tenure with the Fabulous Thunderbirds.

“We had finished that record over two years ago, right after I left the Thunderbirds,” he said. “I shopped it around, and it was probably a full year before we got a deal. We wanted to take the songs and arrange them in a way that they wouldn’t be just one type of music, just shuffles and old rock ‘n’ roll beats. We wanted to have a lot of different colors and sounds.”

Among those different colors are a couple of firsts for Robillard: the electric sitar he deploys on the tense, dramatic rocker “The Change Is On” and the use of acoustic guitar as a lead instrument on the traditional-leaning blues shuffle “Temptation.”

He joined the T-Birds in 1990 as the replacement for his friend, respected Texas guitarist Jimmie Vaughan. “I went in hoping I could bring something to it and it would have a unified direction, using my talent. As is understandable for a band with major hits, they (continued to) play that music. I had to fill the role of Jimmie Vaughan, which was fun, but it wasn’t moving fast enough in a direction of growth, using what I could add to it. I missed being my own man, and I missed singing.”

Hence the second chapter in Robillard’s solo career (“Temptation” was preceded by six jazz, blues and rock ‘n’ roll albums released by the independent Rounder label between 1983 and 1992). He said he is not sure that his Fabulous Thunderbirds affiliation gave his profile much of a boost. But he said the band’s regimen of constant touring got him fully acclimated to the road.

“I’m basically a homebody. I hated (touring) all my life. Now I’ve gotten so used to it, it doesn’t bother me so much. One thing I learned from the Thunderbirds was living on the road”--a good thing, since his schedule in Europe and North America recently has called for around 250 dates a year.

For years, his routine called for short U.S. or European tours, followed by months on end of regional club work in the Northeast. Now, “I’m just trying to make my career a success, and the only way I can do that is constantly to be out there.”

Like a lot of roots-oriented musicians, Robillard spent the 1980s and early ‘90s hoping for a pop breakthrough--a hope encouraged by the Top 40 singles success of the T-Birds’ “Tuff Enuff” and Robert Cray’s “Smoking Gun.”

Now, Robillard says, the climate has changed.

“It may not be a good time” for scoring a mass hit with a blues-rock hybrid, he said. “It seems like people are actually starting to appreciate the traditional styles more now. We’ve gotten pockets of airplay with certain tunes on ‘Temptation.’ But there’s nobody in that (roots-rock) genre that’s doing really well right now by writing original songs that are bluesy, (with) a rock ‘n’ roll base.”

Of course, when popular tastes or his own inclinations shift, he can simply turn that three-cornered hat around and let the appropriate peak stick out a little more. He said his newest album, “Duke’s Blues,” is “a blues album that’s a tribute to my heroes, going back to the sound I had with Roomful, with horns and keyboards on it.”

It is available only in Canada, but he said it is likely that Pointblank will pick it up for domestic release. Jazzier work will be featured on an upcoming album by veteran jazz-blues singer Jimmy Witherspoon. Robillard and his old Rhode Island buddy, jazz saxophonist Scott Hamilton, are the featured soloists.

“As I get older, I’m probably going to gravitate a little more toward the traditional aspect of it,” he said. “A lot of people think the biggest part of my talent is to improvise in a blues or jazz vein. What I’d like to do is record with a lot of people and use that as my outlet for different kinds of music.

“A lot of people are versatile, but a lot of them remain studio players. I can do three different things that are an honest part of my makeup, not something I do because I’m hired to do it. It keeps life interesting.”

* Duke Robillard and John Hammond play Saturday at the Galaxy Concert Theatre, 3503 S. Harbor Blvd., Santa Ana. 8 p.m. $16.50. (714) 957-0600.