My name is Leslie Damaso, I’m a Filipino American artist living in Mineral Point, WI. I’m the owner of Buttonhill Music Studio, where I teach voice and piano lessons and also where I host concerts ranging from my students’ recitals to regional and international acts performing classical music, jazz, electro-tango and more. I’m also a co-owner of Republic of Letters bookstore. Along with my partner, we are the stewards of two historic buildings, both of which are hubs for innovation, learning, community and creativity. I am also a photographer and an author of poetry and essays, as well as a freelance writer for arts and culinary publications. Last March of 2025, I was part of a team that created the only book written about Driftless Area artisanal cheesemakers, called The Wisconsin Whey.
As a performance artist, my last work was a collaborative project with Minnesota based, Hmong American author, Kao Kalia Yang. Last December, to celebrate her children’s books, I composed and premiered a piece for piano and voice for her program at the Ordway Center in St. Paul. Last fall, my collaboration with L.A. hip hop artist Carl Angelo was included in the soundtrack for the thriller Him, directed by Justin Tipping and produced by Jordan Peele, featured in theaters nationwide. Last summer, I composed and recorded with 2025 NPR Tiny Desk Contest winner, Filipino hip hop artist Ruby Ibarra in California. In July, I hosted and worked with Gean Almendras of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor to present works of kulintang, indigenous gong instruments from the southern Philippines. For two days we performed and held an open studio of the various instruments in a kulintang ensemble.
In June of 2024, I released my third album, a Filipino jazz opera on double vinyl SIRENA with my co-producers Madison based trio Mr. Chair, which includes bassist Ben Ferris, pianist Jason Kutz and drummer Mike Koszewski. The album also features Chicago based saxophonist Jon Irabagon, violinist Janice Lee, and guitarist Jose Guzman. SIRENA includes my artwork and a story I wrote about a love triangle between a mermaid, the sun, and the moon, ending in the beginning of a nation, the displacement of its people and an individual’s search for identity and belonging, set within new compositions and contemporary arrangements of Philippine kundiman – a song genre which emerged as a reaction to 333 years of Spanish colonization. To reach back to the place on the other side of the world, where I was born and to create a bridge to my home now, through art, was a tremendous and fulfilling experience. SIRENA toured in the Midwest and on the west coast.
Prior to the album release, I performed for the opening celebration of a year-long exhibit at The Wing Luke Museum in Seattle. I was featured in the exhibit of Asian musicians in the American Diaspora, as part of a preview of an educational packet developed for Smithsonian Folkways.
"This place is both an inspiration and a canvas for all of my creative work. [...] It's been helped by nature itself, the passions of the people out here, and the landscape of course..."
The funds from this grant are going towards my fourth album. From my first record, my artistic journey started with a focus on lyrics, the rhythms and inflections of the English language and vocal performance which maximally expressed the emotional content of words along with melody. That record, Chained to the World, was a solo study on the works of Tom Waits. The second album, May Laya, a Tagalog phrase, which means “there is freedom”, was a piano and vocal duo of kundiman songs, which were patriotic pieces disguised as love songs. It was my first act of reaching back to the culture of where I was born. After having studied opera at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, I was searching for a way that could fully express the duality of home, to see what that meant and ultimately to find a way to express who I was as a Filipino American in the context of artistic expression. SIRENA, the third album, which I described previously, was a further exploration into the history of the Philippines and how it has affected people like myself in the diaspora. It was also a way to bridge my two homes further by including more ensemble members from different backgrounds as an experiment to see what happens when you bring people together to interact with unfamiliar music.
For my fourth album, I am inspired by a scientific term: synomones. They are chemical signals that benefit both the sender and receiver such as a flower producing scent to attract pollinators. The pollinator gets food and the plant gets fertilized. Just like human interaction and just like the performer and audience relationship, I believe that there must be intention, purpose, and a willingness to open up a path to understand each other’s humanity and hope that this practice of empathy through beauty will enable us to enrich each other’s lives.
The SYNOMONES album will consist of kulintang music which I have been studying since 2020 with various teachers, most of which were mentored by the late Danongan Kalanduyan, the musician to first bring kulintang North America. In the album, I will sing in Tagalog, English, Hmong, Croatian, Italian and more. Each song will be a rich expression of a personal connection and an effort to heal by reaching out to the world. With my collaborators we will create an amalgamation of sound never before heard in Wisconsin or elsewhere.
