Fundamental to Jazz guitar playing are chords. You need to know lots and lots of chords to be able to play chord-based solos, or to accompany, well. This can be quite daunting, given the number of chords and variations. An easy way to break down learning these chords is to simplify into “6th string root” chords and “5th string root” chords. These are chords with the root note played on the 6th and 5th strings respectively. For all intents and purposes, there are three distinct kinds of chords. Major, minor and dominant 7th. There are variations on these chords - playing a 6th, a 7th, a 9th, a 13th - and so on. Learn the basic shapes for major, minor and dominant 7th. That makes three different shapes to learn - then learn the additional flavours. Very soon you will have no trouble playing any given chord that is called, since you just move the same shape around the fretboard. For each chord though, you want to be able to play it in at least two different positions on the guitar. This is where 5th string root chords come in. For every chord you learn to play with the root on the 6th string, learn to play the equivalent with the root on the 5th string. This will give you the basic versatility. You can also learn 4th string root chords for yet more variety. From here, standard Jazz progressions and changes become much more accessible.
I had hoped to draw out the chord diagrams for at least the three basic 6th string root and 5th string root chords, but I haven’t found satisfactory software to save the output. A useful tool for learning chords though is Tux Guitar, a free Java tablature editor and player, which includes a chord editor.
