About: Portrait of Sinatra: Columbia Classics

Portrait of Sinatra: Columbia Classics is a compilation album by Frank Sinatra, released in 1997. This compilation was later re-released in 2010 as The Essential Frank Sinatra: The Columbia Years. While some prefer the Sinatra of the Capitol era, citing that work as more elegant and artful, the recordings Frank made for Columbia in the 1940s and early 1950s are just as important. They represent a different phase in Sinatra's evolution, but are no less striking in their emotional impact. While Axel Stordahl, Sinatra's chief arranger at Columbia, may not have been the modernist/minimalist that Nelson Riddle would become in the latter's Capitol work, Stordahl was as sympathetic a collaborator as Sinatra had encountered to that point.