He was touring with Harry Styles. Then a car accident changed everything

Alassane Diarra was coming off three months of shows with Harry Styles — touring sold-out arenas as a keyboard-playing sideman for the superstar's support act Jenny Lewis — when his life took a dramatic turn.

It was Dec. 11, 2021, exactly three weeks after his last concert on the Styles tour, and Diarra, who hadn't had an epileptic episode in years, was driving from his home in Tucson to a wedding gig in Phoenix.

"I had a seizure behind the wheel," he says. "And luckily, nobody else got hurt, besides myself, which is better than hurting someone else."

He feels fortunate that the accident happened as close as it did to the Banner University Medical Center Emergency Room, which is just off the 7th Street exit of the I-10 near McDowell Road.

"Given the severity of the injury, if that had occurred between Tucson and Phoenix, just randomly on the 10 somewhere, in the middle of that freeway, it could have been a major loss because I did need surgery immediately," he says. "So I was very lucky."

He fractured both ankles and sustained a lower-back injury.

"My ankles took the brunt of it," he says. "The left ankle was far more severe of an injury than the right but both needed surgery right away. So they operated that night."

Diarra spent the next the three and half weeks in a Banner rehab hospital, recovering and learning how to do things for himself without being able to walk or use his legs.

"The team there was incredible," he says. "This is kind of my first time really experiencing how incredible health workers are."

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'A long recovery process'

He stayed with family in Phoenix for another month or so while seeing his surgeon for follow-ups before returning home in early February 2022.

The recovery process has gone well, Diarra says, thanks to the work of his physical therapists, doctors and surgeons. His right ankle and his lower back are both completely healed. But the break in his left ankle required additional surgeries, two of which he underwent in early August and a third, an ankle fusion, in September.

Now, he's starting the entire rehabilitation process over, still unable to resume his usual line of work as a musician.

"It's still gonna be a long recovery process, like four or five months, probably," he says. "But it's not gonna be as complicated as before. There's definitely light at the end of the tunnel with this one, just because that was the weirdest part before was doing all that physical therapy and there not being any clear indicator that it was working."

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Diarra is a lifelong musician

Until the accident, his primary sources of income have freelance gigs as a touring musician and corporate gigs. Professional musician is the only job he's ever known.

"I started gigging professionally when I was 15, 16," he says. "So I don't have anything else to fall back on. I don't have any other marketable skill as a contingency. So it's tough. I wasn't really prepped for this kind of scenario."

He toured with Courtney Marie Andrews from 2018 until the end of 2019, including appearances on "CBS This Morning" and an NPR Tiny Desk concert

"She was the first one," Diarra says. "I think we did three or four U.S. tours and two European tours. We did this one-off in the Dominican Republic. That was actually a festival John Prine had put on not too long before he passed. So that was really special."

Landing on the Harry Styles tour

COVID-19 took him off the road for most of 2020 into 2021, when he was asked to play with Lewis on the Styles tour.

"I got recommended and she hit me up and said I had two weeks to learn the material and get ready if I wanted to do it," Diarra recalls. "So I basically put everything I'd planned on hold and flew out to rehearsals at the end of August 2021.

The Styles tour included a number of "bucket-list" venues for Diarra.

"We played three nights at Madison Square Garden," he says. "That was incredible. The Forum, Staples Center, Tacoma Dome, just really iconic venues I had always dreamed of playing, especially the Garden. That's kind of like the Vatican of music venues. It's a pretty sacred place."

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Styles 'a nice guy for a global superstar'

It was a lot of work, he says. But it was great. He learned a lot and got to hang with Styles a bit.

"I think the industry was looking at that tour as sort of a barometer to gauge how feasible it was for large-scale tours to happen post-COVID," Diarra says. "So compared to other tours I've been on, it wasn't nearly as loose in terms of interacting. But he and Olivia Wilde came backstage a couple times. He's a nice guy for a global superstar."

It also paid well.

"I was able to sit pretty comfortably for the first few months after the accident because of that tour," he says. "I didn't have to worry for a minute. But then, you know, more time passes, and it's like, 'OK, well, now we've got to start figuring something out.'"

He had originally planned to use the money from that Styles tour to move to New York City.

"It's still on the horizon," he says. "I still have New York as the destination eventually. I've just gotta get through this last chapter. It's one of those things where, like, I know on paper, it's not logical. It's a tough place to make it. But there's just something super-intrinsic and intuitive when I'm there that's just like 'This would work for you.'"

If all goes well, he should be back to work by February.

In the meantime, Diarra has started a GoFundMe to help with medical expenses as well as the everyday living expenses he typically covers through his work as a musician.

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Asking the community for help

Once he's back on his feet, the ultimate goal is to transition into doing his own music full-time.

His latest efforts, 2020's "Yield" EP and last year's "Moot Points," a single recorded with Tucson jazz musicians Rachel Eckroth and Tim Lefebvre, are an experimental cross between progressive-jazz and art-rock, released as Alassane.

"Those particular projects, I feel I was really just kind of making music that I want to hear," he says. "And that ended up being pretty experimental. Luckily, I had a lot of time to piece things together and to experiment in that way."

Working with Eckroth and Lefebvre "was very exciting, because they're very accomplished and inspiring artists and musicians," he says. "So it was a huge compliment to be invited to work with them."

Until then, Diarra has tried to line up freelance work recording from home.

"I have a home studio setup," he says. "But it hasn't been all that consistent, unfortunately."

He's taken a couple of customer service gigs that he can do from home.

"But having zero experience doing any of that, it was pretty hard to land anything," he says. "So I've just kind of been floating by on the generosity of friends and I had unemployment for a short while. But I'm really hoping this GoFundMe will be able to help me out for a little."

Reach the reporter at ed.masley@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-4495. Follow him on Twitter @EdMasley.

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This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: A musician toured with Harry Styles. Then a car crash changed his life