Yaya Bey Serves Up Soulful, Relaxed R&B To Free At Noon

Yaya Bey made the trip down from Queens to Philadelphia Friday for another installment of Free At Noon, and the R&B artist delivered a smooth, casual, and oftentimes hilarious show to a well-attended event.

Yaya Bey — whose real name is Hidaiyah Bey and the daughter of the late hip-hop artist Grand Daddy I.U. — was joined for her eight-song set by keyboardist Chris Martin (no, not the Coldplay frontman), who held down the low end and melodies with a warm electric piano tone throughout the performance.

They opened with “Alright,” from her 2022 album Remember Your North Star. “If I just give it to the sky, I bet it might just be alright,” she sang. After the song, she said she woke up stressed out by a dream. But not a dream that’s full of uncanny people, places, or things; but rather a dream about an obligation on her Monday schedule.

However, she said she was starting to feel better, and that was made clear throughout the rest of the gig.

They moved on to “on the pisces moon,” also from Remember Your North Star, then “exodus the north star” from her 2023 EP of the same name.

After performing “sir princess bad bitch” from 2024’s Ten Fold, she spoke to the crowd, which included a group of students from a local high school who were touring the WXPN building. Yaya Bey lamented she hopes education remains a priority in America, and joked about how even good people use curse words, earning a laugh from show goers. It should be noted Yaya Bey did a wonderful, and sometimes quite comical, job of censoring herself due to the performance being broadcast live on our airwaves and streamed online.

She also discussed her awkwardness, something she said didn’t get left behind in her youth. “I brought it along with me [to adulthood],” she said.

She went back to Remember Your North Star and dived into “nobody knows.” In between the song’s actual lyrics, which include the lines “I’m not perfect baby / No one’s coming to save me, save me,” she did some freestyle vocalizing, singing about trying not to curse on the radio in the afternoon in Philadelphia. And, harkening to her previous statement about education, sang “read books before they get banned.”

After the song, she addressed the crowd again. “You look like you eat vegetables and pay your taxes,” she said, drawing out more laughter from the audience.

Next up was “the evidence,” released as a single in 2023. Yaya Bey said this song was written at the bottom of her vocal register and likened performing it to have to fulfill the most difficult duty at a job. “But I’m at work and I must do my job,” she said, getting another laugh from the crowd.

While “the evidence” may have been written on the vocal low end, Yaya Bey’s whole performance featured impressive vocal dips into bass territory, complementing the bass lines Martin laid down on the keyboard.

Fidelity, her seventh studio album, is due out April 17, and she gave the crowd a taste of it by performing “Blue,” which has garnered more than 257,000 Spotify plays after dropping on Feb. 18.

Before playing her final song, “end of the world” from last year’s do it afraid, Yaya Bey said she didn’t have an encore planned. Instead, she had well wishes for the audience. “I want everyone in this room to be OK,” she said, eliciting a hearty applause from attendees.

According to the singer, she and Martin had never performed “end of the world” before Friday’s Free At Noon. The only indication of that was the song’s ending, with the two working out on stage the best way to close out the song, and ultimately the performance. Yaya Bey did some lyric-less vocalizing as she and Martin worked to bring it home, leading to her cracking up before heading off stage.