Frank Sinatra - Nothing But The Best (Japan, 2008)

Released to commemorate the tenth anniversary of Frank Sinatra's death, Nothing But the Best is indeed one of the best single-disc compilations ever released on Sinatra. This isn't a career overview, however, since it begins with his inaugural Reprise recordings circa 1960 and surveys the rest of the '60s (including only two tracks not from the '60s). This was the age of Sinatra as the hard-swinging Chairman of the Board, illustrated perfectly by "Luck Be a Lady" and "My Kind of Town." But it was also the age of wistful, middle-aged material like "Summer Wind," "Strangers in the Night," and, of course, "It Was a Very Good Year." And it was also the age when Sinatra had the freedom to record with everyone he wanted to record with, whether it was Count Basie or Antonio Carlos Jobim or his daughter Nancy (the latter on the 1967 chart-topper "Somethin' Stupid"). All of those periods are represented on Nothing But the Best, which takes its place above the best previous Reprise collection, Sinatra Reprise: The Very Good Years, even though it somehow omits one of his classics, "Love and Marriage." For this compilation, Reprise also commissioned new 2008 remasters of each track, which sound better than any previous, and added a new bonus track: a version of "Body and Soul" with a vocal recorded in 1984 laid over a 2007 arrangement by Torrie Zito and Frank Sinatra, Jr.