Should these groups be merged?

The latter is somewhat unusual as parts of the performance have been recreated via computer. This is what AllMusic has to say:

For many serious jazz fans, no pianist has ever approached the technical mastery of Art Tatum, though his virtuoso skills usually meant he was at his best unaccompanied. Many of his recordings from the 1930s & ‘40s were limited by the deficiencies of recording methods at the time. Piano Starts Here, long considered 1 of Tatum’s definitive albums, combined 4 solos from a 1933 studio session (his 1st as a soloist, aside from a test pressing a year earlier), & a fabulous solo concert at the Shrine Auditorium in 1949 (the latter issued as an Armed Forces Radio Service 16" transcription disc), which has been reissued many times over the decades. But there were several problems with these releases. The pitch was slightly too slow on the live material. A medley of George Gershwin tunes was awkwardly edited (a miserly decision to save on royalty payments) to only “The Man I Love,” discarding over 1 minute of other compositions, including “Summertime,” "I’ve Got Plenty of Nothin’," & “It Ain’t Necessarily So.” The order of the live performances was also altered.
Zenph Studios decided to use 21st century computer technology to re-create this album, both the 1933 studio session & the famous 1949 concert. The technicians worked wonders with the source material, by correcting the speed & adding the missing segments. Improvements in computer technology enabled the staff to not only replicate how Tatum played each key, but also to duplicate his use of the sustain pedal, recording the playback on a MIDI file that in turn served as source for a Yamaha Disklavier Pro concert grand piano, which was recorded 2 different ways on the very same Shrine Auditorium stage. They even took the time to duplicate the exact location of the piano on-stage for Tatum’s original Shrine concert. No audience was used for the 1933 selections, which included versions of “Tea for Two” & “Tiger Rag,” in all likelihood similar to the performances Tatum used to best both Fats Waller & James P. Johnson during a Harlem cutting contest not long after Tatum arrived in New York City. Of major interest is the greatly improved fidelity of the re-creation of the 1949 concert. Instead of using generations-old, flawed tapes that were descended from the original AFRS transcription disc, the MIDI file as played back on the Yamaha Disklavier Pro concert grand piano seems closer to the essence of what Tatum’s original performance sounded like.

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I would say Yes as they are the same release, but a remaster. Like an anniversary re-issue.

At the heart of it is the same album, but every note may have been tweaked and tampered with and polished up. And extras slung on the end of the disc. At the centre of it are the same original recordings. There are many examples of Release Groups like this.

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Oh no, the second album is created from MIDI files.
It’s a new generated sound, not the recorded sound.
For me it’s a new release group, like the new release groups when a band self-covers of their old albums.

Like dog man star (live self cover; but as it’s live, the new release group was more obvious) or LUNA SEA (self cover) or even more like the hitech series ハイテックシリーズ (MIDI versions).

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Pro: They share the same tracklist and artists
Con: Different artwork, different performance (but new recordings have already been created in MB)
Decider (IMHO): Recorded 2007 (see https://ia802601.us.archive.org/26/items/mbid-18bdd715-07ea-4db2-ac89-2fc02491f76b/mbid-18bdd715-07ea-4db2-ac89-2fc02491f76b-10058038977.jpg)

That is confusing to me. What about when an album is remastered from the original tapes? Isn’t this going back as far. Generating a new version of the sound from the originals in a different way? This does go a lot further than normal in the manipulation of the source material it has to work with, but isn’t the end result aiming to re-produce the original album?

Do you know MIDI?

It’s like a score, it contains notes only and then you load some piano samples and it’s played back. But here, instead of samples, it’s played back on a piano (Yamaha Disklavier Pro) with replay capability.

This is more than a remix (new release group), which is already more than a remaster.

No. Because even though the first tracks are the same titles, they are all “Zenph re-performance”. If it included the original recordings than maybe an argument could be made, but it seems that none of the recordings actually appear on the original LP.

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There is a new pinned topic about this same topic:

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