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If you're a guitarist used to campfire chord strumming, your first look at a sheet for a jazz tune can be intimidating. You're used to tunes that start with four measures of C, then four of Am, etc. Now you're confronted with something like Ebm7b5 Ab7#5b9 Dbm11... and that's just the first measure! What I found is, you can't handle jazz chords by looking them up in your chord bible and memorizing the finger shapes. There are just too many chords to remember, and the names are too complicated. It's much better to learn how chords are constructed and through that what the names actually mean. Once you know that, you can quickly figure out how to finger any chord you encounter anywhere on the fretboard. It also gives you some useful information on how to improvise over the chord. In fact, chord construction is quite simple. Take the C major scale (white notes on the piano), written out over two octaves, and number the notes through like this:
To build a chord, you just take the odd-numbered notes beginning at 1 and not skipping any. A chord needs at least three notes, so the simplest chord you can build is 1-3-5 or C-E-G. That's a C major chord. After 1-3-5, the next in the sequence is 7. You see why 4-note chords are referred to as 7th chords? In this case we have C-E-G-B, which is a Cmaj7 chord. And so it continues: Cmaj9 is the 5-note chord C-E-G-B-D, Cmaj11 is the (horrible sounding!) 6-note chord C-E-G-B-D-F, Cmaj13 is the 7-note chord C-E-G-B-D-F-A. And that's it - it's that simple! The next note in the sequence would just bring us back to the beginning again, so chord names stop at 13. You see that only the highest number needs to be mentioned in the chord name, the presence of all odd-numbered notes up to the one named is implied. If a chord contains just the note number given and not the lower numbers, this is indicated with the word "add" in the chord name. For example, C-E-G-B-A would be called Cmaj7(add13). In practice this distinction is unimportant for guitarists, because we don't have enough fingers to play a 7-note chord anyway. 4 notes are generally the most we can manage, and the rule is: play the root (1), the 3, the 7 and the highest numbered extension. Skip the 5th, and skip any extensions between the 7 and the highest. If you're playing with a bassist, you can skip the root as well. If any of the notes in the chord are to be sharpened or flattened, this is just written directly in the chord name. So if F# is wanted in the chord instead of F, the chord is called Cmaj7(#11). If Ab instead of A, then it's Cmaj7(b13). That also applies to notes that otherwise wouldn't be named explicity: if the 5 is sharpened the chord name will include #5, but a natural 5 wouldn't be mentioned at all. So, this is still quite simple and straightforward. The only other thing you need to know is that certain flattened and sharpened chord tones have special names that have become established through the history of music, and there are a few special cases. These are:
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