First of all sry for shitty audio quality. So this is more of an excercise than a real arrangement. I remember seeing a Kurt Rosenwinkel masterclass on youtube where he got a question on how he approaches learning a song to play it as a chord melody. He said one thing he did was to play through the song with sparse chords, first the root + 7 and then the 3 + 5, in order to get familiar with the tune and to be able to use that as a base for the chord melody. So in the first A section I'm playing only the 1 + 7 of the chord, then the 2nd A section it's 3 + 5 instead. I think it's good practice, both for learning to find small chords in different places on the fretboard and it's probably good for soloing as well because it helps to get the chord tones ingrained into your brain and fingers. A more advanced version of the excercise could be to do this but only find the chords in one position, so between 5 frets or so. Might be hard/impossible to play the melody at the same time though.

And if anyone has the link to the masterclass I'm talking about I would be grateful, it seems to have been removed from youtube. I can't find it again at least.