Mike Jbara’s career spans two countries and an array of talent.
He is vice president and general manager of Lenbrook Media Group, a privately held audio hardware company in Toronto.
The enterprise owns brands like Bluesound, NAD Electronics, and PSB Speakers, and Jbara runs a new media division focused on music experiences, software, and intellectual property.
“We develop software that can be used to make studio production better, and I’m leading the effort to build a new streaming service that’s going to focus on people who really care about higher-quality audio delivered in a particular way,” says Jbara.
“Music and performance was part of our family’s way of life from the beginning of time. And I would say for most of the path that I’ve taken, it probably started in our house on Grandview Street in Westland.
“My mom is a piano player, and a huge influence in my life, so I felt like music and entertainment performance were running through my blood.”
Jbara’s two brothers and a sister also caught the music bug from their mother.
“We were all doing theater forensics competitions,” recalls Jbara, the youngest of the brood. “We didn’t have a lot of money, so the only times my family (went to) Mackinac Island was (when) the state competitions took place at the Grand Hotel.
“The arts were so pervasive in everything we did at both Wayne Memorial and John Glenn high schools. Both of them had great music and theater programs.”
Joan Jbara was a homemaker, above all else, but she also was a regular substitute teacher at her kids’ schools — “ever-present, active, and very engaged,” Jbara remembers fondly, “although as a young kid, you don’t always love it that your mom’s the one teaching the metric system.”
His father, John, operated an insurance investigation firm.
“My paternal grandfather’s house was on Spokane Avenue in Detroit, and as a young child that was the family homestead and gravitational center of every event in our family,” Jbara says.
“My father was the youngest of 16 (children), so it was an interesting environment because, as a young kid, you didn’t really know who was an aunt, who was an uncle, or who was a cousin. I had first cousins significantly older than my father, just because of that age range.”
The creative energy in his grandfather’s house was challenging and stimulating, and Jbara’s older brothers responded accordingly.
“Both went on to have successful careers in the arts,” Jbara says. “Dan was a very successful television producer, the original line producer for ‘A Current Affair,’ and he went on to develop a lot of shows in New York and L.A. Greg is a Juilliard grad, who was on ‘Blue Bloods’ for 15 seasons and won a Tony Award for ‘Billy Elliott.’ ”
Jbara takes a quick pause before sharing, “I believed, to the bottom of my feet, that I was going to be a professional trumpet player. I studied for a long time with a really fine trumpet player who was a graduate of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and he studied with the principal trumpet player for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, so I thought that was where I was heading.”
Accordingly, Jbara also landed at U-M, where he pursued a degree in mechanical engineering as he continued to play his horn. He also dabbled in the music scene in Ann Arbor, only to quickly be jolted by a sobering reality check.
“I realized there’s a difference between being a really good (technical) trumpet player and being an artist,” he concedes.
“So I wasn’t really on a path of thinking that I was going to do anything with my horn, but a lot of my friends were in bands and most of them weren’t music school students, and I realized there was a path into entertainment that didn’t go through the traditional academic lane of the U-M music program.”
As graduation loomed for U-M’s mechanical engineering students, the usual ritual was to field multiple job offers through on-campus interviews. Not so for Jbara.
“You could write your own ticket if you wanted to be an engineer, but I didn’t do any interviews,” he reveals. “I still didn’t know what I was going to do. My head was in the clouds a little bit, but I knew I didn’t really care about thermodynamics.
“So, I moved to New York to be with my brother, Greg, thinking (that because he was) actively involved in the theater community, maybe that would help me kind of unlock where I needed to be.”
With only a vague idea of pursuing a career in a still-unidentified sector of the music industry, Jbara worked an array of odd, after-hours, part-time jobs. After six months living with his brother, Jbara realized he had to figure out how to pay his bills.
“Because of that degree, I had nine interviews and nine job offers, and chose Accenture, which at the time was called Andersen Consulting,” he says. “I wasn’t really in a position to afford to go to grad school, so I thought that was my version of it — I was going to work as a consultant and really understand how businesses do what they do.”
Jbara spent nine years at Accenture, focusing largely on consumer and media businesses.
“I thought, ah ha, this was the chance for me to connect my interests to companies that could use a steady hand; somebody to come in and say, Hey, let’s just focus on the unsexy operational side of what you’re doing and give you more space to be creative.”
Jbara applied that same approach to his next job at Warner Music Group.
“I started taking time out of the supply chain, which meant we could actually wait longer to put a record out, if that’s what the artist wanted to do,” he says. “So, if I took a month and turned it into a week, that’s three extra weeks for them to be in the studio, fiddling with the audio, doing whatever.”
The philosophy was to increase the capacity of the enterprise, and help companies grow and scale.
Jbara was at Warner for more than 20 years, in large part making his mark by envisioning and building what became the fully digital supply chain of the business, even as CDs were still the primary listening format.
“Basically, I walked into this and said we (didn’t) need to do any of that stuff,” he explains. “We could be sending everything everywhere electronically. I was a kid in a candy shop, taking out millions of dollars and saving us two or three weeks on every release just by standardizing how an audio master was going to get delivered.
“We created the source for all the encoding in the future, and actually built the first encoders in-house so we could deliver finished assets to people that predated even Apple Music.”
All of which led Jbara to his current position at Lenbrook. “I stepped away from the artist development side of it to focus a little bit more on just the product side,” he says. “It was audio, IP, development, and where technology was taking the music listening experience, if you will.
“I also started hanging out in Detroit more often, because I felt I had to do the things I believe Detroit deserves, because of my love for the city.”
Enter Garret Koehler, a young entrepreneur who was hosting music acts all over the city.
“I was throwing shows in chosen warehouses, and a bunch of artists approached me with the idea of opening up a free, collaborative recording space,” Koehler says. “The idea was to get artists from different genres who didn’t typically work together under one roof, where money wasn’t a barrier to entry.
“We bought this historic, abandoned 1872 church (just west of) Michigan Central, and I started Assemble Sound in 2015. Everyone was asking, Why are you buying this old church?”
Everyone except Mike Jbara, whose initial meeting with Koehler was memorable because of the one topic that wasn’t even mentioned.
“There was no request for funding,” Jbara says. “We spoke about what Assemble wanted to accomplish, whether there was any relevance in what I had learned, and how that related to the music business he was creating.”
To get things started, the pair made a pact that if either one called the other, they would pick up the phone right away.
Koehler describes Jbara’s initial role with Assemble as an “informal mentor” who was “driven by this insane curiosity, and can connect dots that you don’t think are connectable, and right away he said what we were doing was a real ecosystem.
“Labels (record companies) spend millions of dollars trying to develop ecosystems, and he’s telling us we did it for essentially nothing. He said, There’s something authentic here, and how can I support it?”
Fast-forward 10 years, and Koehler no longer describes Jbara as simply an informal mentor, but as an investor and board member. During that time, the studio also made a major move as Ford Motor Co. acquired Michigan Central and numerous surrounding properties to create a new mobility innovation campus.
“Mike reminded us that what we were doing wasn’t about the church; it’s about the people, right?” Koehler says. “He told us we made a smart move when we bought it. (He said,) Ford just bought the building next door, so sell it to Ford and let’s find a new spot and move on. That’s what we did, and we actually just built out a new 4,000-square-foot studio at Lantern on Detroit’s east side (at Kercheval and McClellan avenues).”
For the 60-year-old Jbara, who lives with his family in New York’s metropolitan area, the relationship with Koehler and Assemble is just one of many he’s established in his hometown.
“I’m an investor in a number of different restaurants and hospitality businesses in Detroit,” he says. “All of them come from the same place — meaning I believe in the founders and the managers of those businesses.
“You don’t invest in restaurants to get rich, but I love the idea of being part of the employment story in Detroit. My love of the city is my love of the people of Detroit. They’re family, no matter where I might meet them. I believe we’re bound by a shared belief in the goodness of individuals.”
The sentiment connects directly to the earliest days of Jbara’s life as a grandson surrounded by three generations of relatives of all ages, opinions, and personalities.
“I saw what it meant to respect each person and to be a good listener,” he says. “The way they engaged with us with respect and consideration for our ideas, even when we were very young, was a model for how I hope I treat others.
“When I look back at time with my dad’s huge family, often together at my grandfather’s house on Spokane, it feels like a microcosm of the personalities I’ve come across since. I’m not distracted by the first impression of somebody. With so many aunts, uncles, and cousins — all loving people — I saw that we all communicate differently and deserve the assumption of good intentions.”
