BEST BETS Sunday 1/14

COSTA MESA

4pm

Music

Founded in 1974 at the Juilliard School, the American String Quartet has been spending recent seasons performing all of Mozart’s quintets and Bartok’s quartets. For its fifth consecutive Founders Hall appearance, the ensemble will play Mozart’s Quintet in C, K. 515, Schubert’s “Quartettsatz” in C minor and Bartok’s Quartet No. 1. Brian Dembow will be the guest violist in the Mozart quintet.

* American String Quartet, Founders Hall, Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. 4 p.m. $36. (714) 556-2787.

SANTA ANA

8pm

Pop Music

Pop music reunions start to resemble the visual-art exercise known as infinite regression--a painting of an artist painting a picture of himself painting a picture of himself painting a picture, and so on. England’s The Specials and L.A.’s Untouchables were revisiting the past when they surfaced in the early ‘80s playing peppy ska music that had originated in Jamaica in the early ‘60s. If 20 years later these reunited groups are looking back to their past, which looks back to yet another past, it should still be all pretty infectious and danceable.

* The Specials and the Untouchables, Galaxy Concert Theatre, 3503 S. Harbor Blvd., Santa Ana. 8 p.m. $15 to $17. (714) 957-0600.

ANAHEIM

9pm

Pop Music

The new House of Blues in Anaheim will try living up to its name for the first time when it brings in the great Mississippi blues man John Lee Hooker. He’s 80 now (or close to it, depending on whom you believe) and more frail-looking than he was just a few years ago, but the “Boogie Man” can still summon the how-how-howling spirit that’s made his often chilling spin on the blues timeless.

* John Lee Hooker, House of Blues, 1530 S. Disneyland Drive, Anaheim. 9 p.m. $42.50. (714) 778-2583.