She is the most popular jazz band in Texas. Hale Baskin is endowed with a clean, beautiful voice, a confident sense of swing and, it would seem, an innate sense of the nuances of jazz phrasing. By the time she was nineteen, Hale had been awarded three Down Beat awards for student jazz performances, had recorded two full-length CDs, performed with famous musicians such as Arturo Sandoval, Earl Basie and Big Band Orchestra Mike Wax, and led its own ensemble-booked places in four western states.