Does anyone know of a way to tag by recording date? (Either earliest or latest would work, in case of a range of dates.)
I’m not quite sure what you mean by “tag by recording date”.
Do you mean “tag” as in "write metadata values into metadata tags within the digital audio file? In that case, Picard does that by default. There is a Date tag. If the MusicBrainz database has a value for Release Event Date for that Release, Picard puts that value in a metadata tag in the digital audio file.
Do you mean “tag” as in “use the Release Event Date as part of the directory path when moving digital audio files to their destination”? In that case, %date% should get you that.
See Tags & Variables — MusicBrainz Picard v2.10 documentation and https://picard.musicbrainz.org/docs/scripting/#file_naming_examples for more information.
Does this answer your question?
What I meant is to write the recording date (not the release date) into the Date tag (or into some custom tag). By default Picard gives me a date, and an original release date, from release events, but what I’m looking for is to get the recording date from recording level relationships.
You are looking for a “per track” setting there, that is not always going to be available. I have rarely seen Recording Dates unless it is from a live gig. So I am not sure where you’ll get your data from.
There are people around here who are clever with scripts. They expand Picard in magic ways that may help you. If you can find the data, and it is ex-tractable from the database by Picard, then you can make up some kind of rule to put your own data into the date tag.
Try having a dig around in the scripts thread: Your favourite User Scripts for MusicBrainz?! (so that they can be used while redesigning!)
You may be able to find similar examples that take something from the recording level and copy it to a different tag.
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You haven’t spent much time in the jazz area. 
If the data’s not there, I’ll add it…
This is the fun side of a database like this. So many different types of recordings being bought together. 
And true - I haven’t been in that Jazz section much. It is on the list to visit as I have quite a heap of jazz to catalogue. I notice that as the recordings are often pretty old they keep getting reassembled into different collections. I guess this is why so much more detail is kept on the actual recording dates.
It is one of the areas that interest me when strolling around this database. The differing types of data that are of interest to people.
That is one reason, as is the fact that many jazz musicians may re-record the same works (especially standards, but also originals) multiple times over their careers. Yet another is that many jazz fans are interested in “who played with who”, and that is often tied to a specific period.
For instance, two editions of the Miles Davis Quintet are informally known as his “great quintets” - one in the late 50s that included John Coltrane, another in the 60s with Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock. If a new Miles Davis Quintet release of previously unreleased material were to come out tomorrow, fans would certainly want to know if it was recorded with one of these two configurations - and, for many of us, we’d want to sort it in with the other recordings from the same group/period.
My understanding is that this lies in the area called “advanced relationships”.
If I was a competent Picard user I could tell you how to get them happening.
But I’m not and have only dim and unpleasant memories of trying to get “advanced relationships” happening.
If I was after what you seem to want, I’d change the title of this thread to
“How to get a Advanced Relationship tag in Picard?”.
Or call on reosarevok
It is possible that the easiest way forward is a variation of what Jim_DeLaHunt suggests above - though I’d try “advanced relationships” first.