How Originality Is Built Before Anyone Can Hear It
An individual voice rarely arrives as a revelation. It is usually assembled through repetition, correction, adaptation and the people who teach us before we know they are teaching us.
The romantic version of creativity begins with a gifted person discovering a unique voice. Originality, however, is often built in rooms where nobody is applauding, through exercises that sound repetitive, failures that expose weak foundations and mentors whose advice only becomes clear years later.
McCoy Mrubata’s journey offers a useful way to understand that process. He did not begin with a fixed ambition to become a saxophonist. As a teenager, he was drawn to visual art and boxing. A forgotten penny whistle shifted the direction of his life, but the instrument did not immediately give him an identity. It gave him a problem to solve: how does a young musician move from copying what he hears to producing a sound that belongs to him?
Exposure creates possibility, not mastery
Before formal musical language entered the picture, McCoy’s ear was already being trained by a family of record collectors. Relatives played Count Basie, John Coltrane, Archie Shepp, Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gaye and The Supremes. He learnt to recognise artists and the tastes of those playing them.
That kind of education is easy to overlook because it happens informally. Yet culture is often transmitted this way: through repetition, proximity and access. A child hears what adults value, notices what moves them and begins to form an instinct before acquiring the vocabulary to describe it.
Homes, streets, churches, clubs and rehearsal rooms often do work that institutions later formalise. The danger is that when those spaces weaken, talent may still emerge, but the chain of cultural transmission becomes harder to see and easier to lose.
Failure reveals the distance between promise and readiness
Talent can open a door while leaving the person unprepared for what waits behind it. McCoy recalls failing auditions and being told to go back and practise. The rejection did not erase his promise. It clarified the distance between a pleasing tone and professional command.
Many careers stall because potential is mistaken for readiness. The professional who grows is usually the one able to hear criticism without converting it into humiliation. McCoy’s response was practical. He returned to the work.
When the music industry changed and the flute became less useful in commercial bands, he adapted by moving towards the saxophone. Adaptation was not a betrayal of identity. It became part of building one.
Originality is repetitive before it becomes recognisable
When Randall Abrahams asks how McCoy developed his own voice, the answer is strikingly unglamorous: long tones. One note, held and repeated. His mother heard noise and wanted songs. McCoy heard the beginnings of tone.
That image captures a central truth about craft. The work that eventually looks effortless is often built through routines that appear dull from the outside. A recognisable voice is not created by avoiding influence, but by absorbing it, testing it and staying with the fundamentals long enough for imitation to loosen its grip.
Johannesburg later gave McCoy space to move beyond cover versions, but even then, individuality remained vulnerable. Musicians can begin sounding like whoever dominates the room. The challenge is not only finding a voice. It is protecting it while still learning.
The myth of being self-taught
McCoy admits that he once described himself as largely self-taught, then recognised the arrogance inside the claim. Books and private study mattered, but so did the older musicians who corrected his breathing, answered his questions and invited him into their working world. Some of their lessons only made sense years later.
This is the hidden architecture behind most creative achievement. Individual effort is real, but it usually develops inside a network of influence, correction and permission. Calling someone self-made may celebrate independence, yet it can also erase the teachers, communities and opportunities that made independence possible.
The better question is not whether a person taught themselves. It is whether they were attentive enough to recognise every place the teaching came from.
McCoy’s story suggests that originality is not the absence of influence. It is what remains after influence has been studied, tested, challenged and made personal. Music may find someone in an instant. A voice takes much longer.
Catch up on all Both Sides episodes here: https://www.enca.com/both-sides-podcast