Singer and musician Abdollah Davami was taught as a teenager to perform radif, 19th-century Persian classical music, by master Ali Khan Nayeb-al-Saltaneh. ∙ Davami learned the tasnif vocal form and the art of playing the tonbak drum through his studies with such Persian masters as Haji Khan, Agha Jan, and Sama Hozur. ∙ Shortly before World War I, he recorded several tasnifs on 78-rpm discs for Monarch Records. ∙ During the 1950s, he appeared regularly on TV and radio, introducing Persian classical music to a new generation of listeners. ∙ Davami was instrumental in the transcription of Persian classical songs, preserving for posterity hundreds of compositions that had previously been orally passed down. ∙ His 1970s recordings of his complete radif repertoire were not released until many years after his death.