Due to its improvisational nature, jazz rarely repeats itself precisely from performance to performance, even during studio takes; it's almost impossible for music lovers who believe in artistic finality to determine the "real" version of a given jazz composition. But in the case of John Coltrane's 1965 LP A Love Supreme, the problem is easily resolved. Coltrane and his three sidemen entered the Van Gelder Recording Studio in New Jersey on Dec. 9, 1964, and recorded the entire album-length suite, in sequence, with only a couple of botched takes, one alternate version of Part 2 ("Resolution"), and two brief overdubs. The entire process took a couple of hours, and then the quartet reconvened the next night with two extra players and made a couple of passes through Part 1 ("Acknowledgement") before wrapping production and releasing the results of the first night's recording. In the two and a half years between the release of A Love Supreme and his death in 1967, Coltrane occasionally performed passages from the suite in concert, but only once played the complete work live, at a jazz festival in France. That 1965 performance has now been made available on CD, along with the scant A Love Supreme outtakes and alternate takes from 1964, and a remastered version of the original suite. The liner notes for the "Deluxe Edition" were written by Ashley Kahn, adapted from his new book A Love Supreme, which organizes a sketchy biography of the legendary saxophonist around a comprehensive description of the making of his most enduring work. Kahn breaks down what's happening in each minute of A Love Supreme, linking its spiritual dimensions to Coltrane's religious upbringing and battles with drug addiction, and tracing its polar tugs of terse melodic structure and "free jazz" to the musician's decades of experimenting with scalar and modular interpretation. Kahn also interviews fans and students of the record, who relate their experiences at coming to grips with music that can sound wildly noisy in one context and divinely meditative in another. Along the way, the author clarifies the mysterious processes of jazz by detailing how players develop their vocabulary, how they collaborate, and how they balance their desire to explore the boundaries of the craft with the need to make commercial concessions. Above all, Kahn's book never loses track of the elusive, here-today-gone-tomorrow qualities that make Coltrane's sound so singular, and that make jazz in all its permutations so confounding.