Does anyone know a clever way to move a whole bunch of recording-work relationships, covering multiple releases, from one work to another? The latest example of this is a fairly obscure arrangement of the Duke Ellington standard “Caravan”, which has accumulated nearly 200 recording rels that should really belong to the original work.
Given the scope, I am considering just merging these works and creating a fresh one for the Callum Au arrangement.
Is this really a work arrangement?
Usually this relationship type is only used for classical. In Jazz, arrangement credits will be added to the recording and if the song was performed without lyrics, it’s “instrumental”.
I assume the arrangement itself is legit; it was added by @reosarevok with a citation to the arranger’s website (which is no longer working, at least for me). The only issue is that, as far as I can tell, none of the recordings linked to that arrangement work are actually recordings of that arrangement.
(But I agree with you in general. I do not typically create new works for unpublished jazz arrangements and would normally add arranger credits directly to a recording. In this case it appears to be a published arrangement that’s been used by several ensembles.)
Are you sure that NONE of the recordings are that version of the work? If NONE, then cheat. Merge the work and make a fresh one for the arrangement.
If the majority of people have been using this as the standard arrangement then you are not really upsetting the MBIDs too much if the majority action has been to hijack the MBID.
There is a userscript that I have always felt very dangerous that automatically select the best work to mass link to recordings.
If I remember correctly you don’t even see which work is selected (or I failed to find it), so it’s why I don’t like to use it.
I don’t remember the name of the userscript but it’s visibly what has been used here by @TheBookKeeper.
I know that userscript, and I think the trouble is the userscript does not show the disambig.
Another problem is that these recordings are instrumental. None of them is marked as such. I suspect the arrangement was chosen because it is instrumental. Actually a script would be needed to add this attribute to all recordings…¹
¹) or to most oft them, but some fine tuning will be necessary anyway
The problem with this one is it was added for the BBC, which explicitly will have this work MBID for the specific arrangement in question. So a merge would break that. That said, this is such a mess that it might be the least bad option anyway, since I think you’re right it does not actually apply to any linked recordings…
Why don’t people read disambiguations? D:
Yeah, Caravan is one of those jazz standards that was written with lyrics, but is almost always performed as an instrumental. It would be easier to have a “lyrics actually sung” checkbox on the recording rel. 
The arranger, Callum Au, was born around 1990 so we can safely assume that any recording by Duke Ellington, who died in 1974, is not his arrangement. There are a couple of brass band versions currently linked that incorrectly have Ellington as a recording artist (due to his composer credit) and I can’t find anything linking those to Au.
Thanks to all for the feedback. I have submitted a merge after removing the Au specific rels. https://musicbrainz.org/work/96de77a3-32b5-41f1-9612-1a1c0af3283f/open_edits
@reosarevok , if we’ve already broken the link to the BBC, is there a compelling reason to re-create the arrangement work?