Listen to WCOM-FM (www.wcomfm.org), Chapel Hill-Carrboro, North Carolina, October 7, 2012, from 9pm to 12 midnight, for The Thelonious Monk Birthday Special with host Larry Reni Thomas. The program will feature three hours of Thelonious Monk’s music and the premiere of an audio documentary called “Thelonious Monk: The Great North Carolina Jazz Intellectual.”

It features commentary and analysis from Jim Ketch, a trumpet player and a jazz studies professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Dr. Larry Ridley, a bassist and former director of the Rutgers University’s jazz studies department, who performed with Monk, Peter Ingram, a drummer and the owner of The Frog And Nightgown, a Raleigh, North Carolina nightclub where Monk performed in 1970, in the pianist’s only appearance in the state of his birth and Leroy Williams, a New York City-based drummer who performed with The Thelonious Monk Quartet at that historic engagement.

The documentary is part of a four part series dedicated to North Carolina native jazz musicians and includes profiles of Thelonious Monk, Max Roach and Nina Simone. For more information about The Thelonious Monk Birthday Special,go to: carolinajazzconnectionwithlarrythomas.blogspot.com.