Not many priests had a second career as manager of a jazz musician, but that was the supplementary vocation of Fr Peter O’Brien, who has died in the Bronx, New York, at the age of 75. A Jesuit, Fr O’Brien served at various churches in New York and New Jersey, but his life changed when in 1964, he met the pianist Mary Lou Williams (pictured), whose passionate Catholicism and care for the oppressed led her to write several Masses and other sacred pieces. The  unlikely friendship was cemented when Fr O’Brien took over management of Williams’ touring and recording. On her death in 1981, he founded the Mary Lou Williams Foundation to help preserve and disseminate her work. She once said of him that “Fr Peter understands that the sacred and the profane don&rsq