Paring down chords

While browsing Amazon I discovered a jazz guitarist called Fareed Haque, who has a few lessons on his website.  One of them that caught my interest is about how to play jazz chords; I’m interested in voicings of chords with a reduced number of notes, firstly for ease of playing, and secondly because between me, the keys player, the bassist and couple of horns players, there are probably enough notes flying around already.  How many people really need to play the fifth anyway?  So recently I’ve been experimenting with things like this:

   Bb7  Eb7
E ----------
B ----------
G --13--12--
D --12--11--
A ----------
E ----------

This nicely ties up with my liking for moments where two chords require very few finger movements to alternate between, e.g. on For Once In My Life.  The downside of this technique is that my practice is sounding less and less like the actual song I’m playing along with: once you take out the root and fifth, things don’t sound quite right.