Marsha Frazier grew up in Houston, Texas, playing classical, church and soul piano and studying flute alongside it. At eighteen she heard John Coltrane's My Favorite Things and switched to jazz, and she became an accompanist on the Texas circuit for touring leaders passing through: Sonny Stitt, Harry "Sweets" Edison, Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis, the Houston tenor saxophonist Arnett Cobb, Eddie Harris, Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson, and the Duke Ellington band. That account comes from her own album's booklet, written by producer Pierre M. Sprey for the 1990 Mapleshade release Blasé, which is the only published biographical sketch of her located for this profile.

Her recorded career starts with drummer Bubbha Thomas's Houston band. Thomas had led the Lightmen since the late 1960s; when Frazier joined on keyboards the group renamed itself the Lightmen Plus One, and she is the "Plus One" of the title. She played electric piano and flute on Fancy Pants, cut at Soundville in Houston on September 5 and October 10, 1971 and issued on the local Judnell label, and wrote its title track. She was also in the rhythm section of Tribute (Advent LP-1001, 1972), the Texas Southern University Jazz Ensemble album that introduced singer Anita Moore, playing Fender Rhodes and flute and taking the piano solos on "Willow Weep for Me," opposite Arnett Cobb's guest tenor, and on Doug Harris's "Sorrow, Bitterness, and Revolution." Saxophonist Ronnie Laws, another Houston player who had passed through the Lightmen, solos on the same record.

The Lightmen Plus One's Energy Control Center, recorded at Nashville Sound Studios in Houston in September and October 1972 and released on Thomas's own Lightin' Records in 1973, is the group's best-known record and the one that carries Frazier's largest footprint. She plays acoustic and electric piano across the album, flute on "The Phantom," and African thumb piano on "Jupiter's Child," which is her own composition; she is also credited as co-producer with Thomas and altoist Virgil Solomon. In 1972 and 1973 she studied with Rahsaan Roland Kirk, whom Sprey's booklet describes as her mentor.

Frazier turns up in New York in the middle of the decade. On a July 1976 night at Ali's Alley, the club drummer Rashied Ali ran out of his own loft at 77 Greene Street in SoHo, she played piano behind the vocalese singer Eddie Jefferson with Ali's quintet: Ali on drums, James Vass and Marvin Blackman on saxophones, and Benny Wilson on bass. The tape sat for three decades before Blue Music Group issued it in 2009 as Eddie Jefferson At Ali's Alley. Sprey's 1990 booklet gives 1980 as the year she moved to New York while separately naming Jefferson, who was killed in May 1979, among the established masters she had played with, so her work with him necessarily predates the move. The Ali's Alley recording is the surviving document of it.

Once settled in New York she attached herself to the Brooklyn scene built around bassist and guitarist Gerry Eastman's Williamsburgh Music Center, which Eastman had opened in 1981. She is the pianist on the Contemporary Composers' Orchestra's Vol. 1 (Williamsburgh Music Center WMC 3098, 1984), a sixteen-piece date whose cast included Joe Ford, John Betsch, Jason Kao Hwang and vocalist Jessica Cleaves, and she plays piano on two tracks and flute on one of Eastman's My Real Self (WMC-3619, 1986), the same LP that carries Frank London on trumpet and Robin Eubanks on trombone. Sprey's booklet lists the players she worked with in those years: Lonnie Plaxico, Lewis Nash, Joe Ford, Ralph Peterson, Ronnie Burrage and Roland Alexander among the newer musicians, and Connie Kay and Charles Davis among the older ones.

Her one album as a leader came out of a chance hearing. Sprey caught her playing solo in a bar on Connecticut Avenue in Washington, D.C., and a month and a half later she drove down from New York with her quintet for two days at Mapleshade Studio, July 18 and 19, 1988. Blasé was released in 1990 on Jazz Heritage, the Musical Heritage Society's jazz imprint, as MHS 512632A, with Joe Ford on alto and soprano saxophone, Lance Bryant on tenor, James King on bass and Rudy Walker on drums. Frazier sings as well as playing piano and flute across a program of Ellington, Miles Davis, Coltrane, Roland Kirk and Joe Ford. No further recordings under her name have been traced. The Houston vocalist Tianna Hall credits "Duke Ellington Orchestra pianist Marsha Frazier" as one of two mentors who shaped her career from 2004 onward, which places a musician of that name and description back in Houston in the 2000s, though no source consulted for this profile confirms the two as the same person. No death notice was found.

Frazier is a pianist who also sings, and Sprey's booklet puts her in the line of jazz pianists turned singers running from Nat King Cole through Nina Simone and Shirley Horn, players whose keyboard training shapes their vocal harmony and phrasing. He describes an earthy contralto that moves from church to jazz club, and hears her range on Blasé as running from Aretha Franklin to Sarah Vaughan, with the ballads as the album's strongest performances: she turns the title song, a piece of 1930s show material, into a flat appeal for love, and reads "Sophisticated Lady" against nothing but alto saxophone and bass. Her flute tone he calls warm and breathy. As a writer she is documented by two pieces, both for the Lightmen: "Fancy Pants," the title track of the 1971 album, and "Jupiter's Child" on Energy Control Center, the latter built on her own African thumb piano. Her instrumental range across the Houston years, acoustic and Fender Rhodes piano, flute and mbira, sits squarely inside the spiritual-jazz vocabulary the Lightmen were working in, and it is that catalogue rather than her leader date that has kept her name in circulation, through Now-Again's reissue program and Stones Throw's The Funky 16 Corners.