Gina and The Red Eye Flight Crew bring their annual Halloween bash home to Temple Street

Portland's eight-piece funk and soul crew takes over Portland House of Music on Saturday night, the room where its Monday nights became a local habit.

There are bands you go to see, and there are bands that become part of the week. For a lot of people in Portland, Gina and The Red Eye Flight Crew have been the second kind: the horn-and-groove outfit that turned Monday nights on Temple Street into something worth leaving the house for. This Saturday, they get the biggest night of the costume calendar.

The Red Eye Flight Crew Annual Halloween Bash lands at Portland House of Music, 25 Temple St., on Saturday, Oct. 31. The venue's ticketing page lists doors at 7 p.m. and music at 8 p.m.; tickets are $25 in advance and $30 the day of the show, and it's 21+. One listing for the night gives a later 8 p.m. doors / 9 p.m. start, so check the ticket page before you plan dinner around it. The room holds a few hundred, which is exactly the size where a band this big fills the floor and the stage at the same time.

If you haven't caught them, here's the shape of it. The group is led by singer Gina Alibrio, a former Boston vocalist, and the ticketing copy describes the band as an energetic eight-piece collective. A 2019 Bollard column called the lineup a who's who of Portland musicians. The repertoire is the dance-floor canon: previews of past Halloween nights promised a full evening of funk, rock, soul and R&B covers, and that's the brief here too. This isn't a band touring a new record — we couldn't find any new release in the works — it's a band that knows how to keep a room moving for a whole night, and does it on a schedule people organize their weeks around.

That schedule is the story. Portland House of Music has hosted the Crew again and again: a Funky Monday run (NEWS CENTER Maine described the Monday night show as running most Monday nights all summer long), a Valentine's ball billed "They Love Me, They Love Me Not!" in February 2024, and a 4/20 Smokeout shared with Hambone. In our own records, Portland is where the band plays more than anywhere else, by a distance. More recently the Press Herald noted a summer residency at Live at Madrid's, so the band hasn't been sitting still between holidays.

This isn't a band touring a new record; it's a band that keeps a room moving for a whole night.

Halloween suits them. A covers band with horns and a front person who can carry funk, rock and soul in the same set is built for a crowd in costume that wants to dance more than it wants to stand and listen. The House of Music room, compact and close to the stage, rewards getting there early; annual nights like this one tend to fill with regulars who've been to the Mondays and know the cues.

So pick the costume you can actually dance in. Buy the advance ticket and save the five dollars. And if you've only ever heard about the Monday nights secondhand, this is the one to finally see, with the whole Crew on stage and the whole town dressed as someone else.

Sources: The Red Eye Flight Crew Annual Halloween bash! — Prekindle (Portland House of Music) (prekindle.com); All events for Gina & The Red-Eye Flight Crew — Portland House of Music (portlandhouseofmusic.com); The Red Eye Flight Crew & Hambone's 4/20 Smokeout — Portland House of Music (portlandhouseofmusic.com); Funky Monday with Gina and the Red Eye Flight Crew — Prekindle (prekindle.com); The Society Page — The Bollard (2019) (thebollard.com); Live music is back in Maine — NEWS CENTER Maine (newscentermaine.com); Soundbites — Portland Press Herald (pressherald.com)