‘One nation, under one groove’

Behind the iron gate on Main Street in Santa Monica is a tiny club with a different flavor, a dark and shadowy red space where L.A.’s Eastside and Westside intersect for a rare energetic social experience. Open for five months, the underground Bar Copa is easy to miss. There’s no sign outside, no industry advertising, nothing to attract attention except for the warmth inside, especially on Tuesdays.

The club’s “Big Up” night draws an ethnic and geographically diverse crowd, pumped up to party late on a school night with its young, charismatic promoter Gaia, and the soulful sounds of DJ Daz.

“When you come in here, there is a very relaxing vibe,” says Gaia, 25. “It has a very gritty, raw element to it. I don’t like anything homogenous because that’s just not how the world really is. I want it to be one nation under one groove.”

The groove, thanks to veteran DJ Daz, ranges from classic hip-hop to soulful house to neoclassical soul, funk and dance hall. “I like the fact that we can play diverse music for a diverse crowd,” says the 30-year-old DJ, who has been spinning in L.A. for 12 years. “The people who come here know they will either get something they haven’t heard in a very long time or something they’ve never heard before.”

Part of the bar’s sexy pull is its cave-like darkness (you actually squint when you walk outside in the dead of the night) and red-tinted wooden walls.

Owner Ashley Joyce, also a partner in the Room in Hollywood and the Room in Santa Monica, said the look and name of the 120-capacity bar was inspired by a trip he took to the Riviera Hotel in Havana. Two blocks north of the Venice border, Bar Copa is in the space known for years as the Pink, and most recently as the Mix.

“The music is not secondary here,” said the British-born Joyce, who lives in Topanga Canyon. “Daz is where the whole night starts.”

Daz, the resident DJ at the Room in Santa Monica on Fridays and at Chocolate Bar on Melrose Avenue on Saturdays, turned a hobby into a career when he was 18. His biggest influences include James Brown, Chaka Khan and Bill Withers.

When Bar Copa manager Kent Howard met Gaia at an album release party, he knew she was the promotional ingredient to best complement Daz’s musical style. “Daz is my DJ. I just love the eclectic music that he plays,” said Gaia, a film student at Cal State L.A. “It goes with the eclectic people I can bring in.”

The twentysomething and thirtysomething crowd shows up around midnight and spends more time dancing and mingling than at the bar.

But as welcoming as it feels, Copa is not for everybody, says its manager. “We keep it like a diamond in the rough,” Howard said. “If you don’t know about the place, then you don’t know the place. People walk out here on the street and see this cheesy, college Main Street atmosphere, and then they come in here and it’s nothing but cool and real. The frat boys don’t get it, but other people come in here and feel the groove and come back.”