Music Album Review: 'Frank Sinatra: Nothing But the Best'

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(C) 2008 Reprise Records
On May 13, 2008, Reprise Records released Frank Sinatra: Nothing But the Best, a compilation album of songs recorded by Frank Sinatra for Reprise (the label he founded in 1960) in the 1960s and '70s. Its release was timed to coincide with the 10th anniversary of Sinatra's death (May 14, 1998), although at least one edition of the album - the British - was issued on May 9, 2008.

Nothing But the Best is not an overview of Francis Albert Sinatra's entire career - a period that began in 1935 when he sang with Harry James and His Orchestra and officially ended in 1994. Most of the 22 songs in the album are from the 1960s, although at least one (Frank's cover of 1977's New York, New York) was originally recorded for 1980's three-record set Trilogy: Past Present Future. 

 The album (which was released in three different versions: the one-CD edition, the Christmas 2-CD set with Nothing But the Best and a Sinatra "Christmas song" album, and the DVD edition which bundled Nothing But the Best with a DVD of a 1980s Sinatra concert) focuses on The Chairman of the Board's middle-aged "Reprise Records" years. As a result, its rendition of Come Fly With Me is slightly different from Sinatra's rendition on Capitol's 1958 eponymous album.

The album showcases three aspects of Sinatra the entertainer.

First, there's "Middle Age Frank" singing wistful, where-has-my-youth-gone numbers along the lines of It Was a Very Good Year, The Summer Knows and Drinking Again. 



Next, there's "Chairman of the Board Frank," the swinging-est guy in showbiz, singing solid standards along the lines of the aforementioned Come Fly With Me, Fly Me to the Moon, The Best is Yet to Come, My Kind of Town and Luck Be a Lady. Though not as bold and energetic as Capitol Era Frank, Sinatra's skills as a singer and showman had not faded quite yet.

And finally, we have "Sinatra the Collaborator," the consummate artist with enough clout in the industry to record with whoever the hell Sinatra wanted to. From legendary jazz bandleader Count Basie (the aforementioned Come Fly With Me) to Brazil's Antonio Carlos Jobim (The Girl from Ipanema), Sinatra collaborated with some of the music world's great artists. Even in Somethin' Stupid (his famous, or infamous, duet with daughter Nancy; some wags jokingly refer to this one as "the Incest Song," a label that the two Sinatras took in stride as a joke), Frank is at the top of his game.

My Take

 I'm a tail-end Baby Boomer, born late in the Kennedy Administration and therefore a Sixties-era kid. My late parents both liked Frank Sinatra, and Mom owned a couple of his 1960s-era LPs when we lived first in Miami and later in Bogota, Colombia. So naturally, Sinatra's songs were part of the soundtrack of my childhood. I liked most of the songs I heard then, but because Mom gave her sizable record collection away during our 1972 move back to the States, I wasn't exposed to "The Voice" on a daily basis until relatively recently.

Until the fall of 2015, the number of Sinatra records in my music collection was exactly...zero. Not because I don't like the guy; I loved his performance as the doomed Private Maggio in From Here to Eternity. But when you are not exactly swimming in money, you have to choose carefully on what you spend your "entertainment bucks," and Sinatra records usually rank 999th on my list of 1,000 Nice Things to Buy.



I bought Nothing But the Best in October of 2015, partly to assuage my feelings of sadness over my mom's then-recent death, and partly to prepare for a karaoke party that my high school classmates were planning around that time. I planned to sing a couple of Frank's songs, including Just the Way You Look Tonight at Open Stage in Coral Gables, so I figured that if I had a Sinatra recording to sing along to, so much the better.  So I went to my favorite online store, Amazon, and looked for a good but inexpensive album of Frank Sinatra songs.

Three years later, I'm still not a Sinatra aficionado; my favorite musical genres are classical and film scores, so my Sinatra CD collection is still rather modest. (In addition to Nothing But the Best, I own The Ultimate Sinatra, a four-CD set Reprise released in 2015 to observe Frank's Centennial.)  I don't listen to it on a daily basis, but it's one of my Top 20 Favorite Albums now. (It also doesn't hurt that it's included on my digital albums in Amazon Music, one of the many benefits of being an Amazon Prime member.)

Now, I don't love every song on Nothing But the Best. Drinking Again is downright depressing, and I find My Way to be the National Anthem of the egotistic and narcissistic people in the world. Maybe I'll change my tune when I'm older, but for now, it's one of those songs I usually hit the Skip button when I know it's coming up on the playlist.

On average, though, I enjoy listening to Sinatra: Nothing But the Best. It benefits from Reprise's decision to digitally remaster all of the tracks, so the 2008 album features the best, clearest sound of the Sinatra compilation records out there. It has songs that fit almost every mood, and...hell, it's freakin' Frank Sinatra, man!

If you're a Sinatra fan, you probably own a copy of Nothing But the Best (and I am preaching to the choir, I guess).

In case you're new to the sounds of Swing and Singers and are wondering what album to start a Sinatra collection with, or just want one "sampler" of Ol' Blue Eyes songs, Nothing But the Best is the one record I'd recommend.

Track Listing:



1. "Come Fly with Me" (Sammy Cahn, Jimmy Van Heusen) - 3:14

2. "The Best is Yet to Come" (Cy Coleman, Carolyn Leigh) - 2:56

3. "The Way You Look Tonight" (Jerome Kern, Dorothy Fields) - 3:22

4. "Luck Be a Lady" (Frank Loesser) - 5:15

5. "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered" (Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart) - 3:00

6. "The Good Life" (Sacha Distel, Jack Reardon) - 2:27

7. "The Girl from Ipanema" (Antonio Carlos Jobim, Norman Gimbel, Vinícius de Moraes) - 3:14

8. "Fly Me to the Moon (In Other Words)" (Bart Howard) - 2:28

9. "Summer Wind" (Heinz Meier, Hans Bradtke, Johnny Mercer) - 2:55

10. "Strangers in the Night" (Bert Kaempfert, Charles Singleton, Eddie Snyder) - 2:45

11. "Call Me Irresponsible" (Cahn, Van Heusen) - 2:56

12. "Somethin' Stupid" [With Nancy Sinatra] (Carson Parks) - 2:40

13. "My Kind of Town" (Cahn, Van Heusen) - 3:11

 14. "It Was a Very Good Year" (Ervin Drake) - 4:27

15. "That's Life" (Kelly Gordon, Dean Kay) - 3:07

16. "Moonlight Serenade" (Glenn Miller, Mitchell Parish) - 3:28

17. "Nothing But the Best" (Johnny Rotella) - 3:00

18."Drinking Again" (Johnny Mercer, Doris Tauber) - 3:15

19. "All My Tomorrows" (Cahn, Van Heusen) - 4:35

20."My Way" (Paul Anka, Claude Francois, Jacques Revaux, Gilles Thibault) - 4:36

21. "Theme from New York, New York" (Fred Ebb, John Kander) - 3:25

22. "Body and Soul" [Previously unissued] (Frank Eyton, Johnny Green, Edward Heyman, Robert Sour) - 4:20

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