Turnarounds

A turnaround is a short chord progression, usually just two bars, that sits at the end of a section and turns the harmony back around to the top of the form. Instead of letting the music rest on the tonic, it keeps the root motion active right through the barline, so the last measure of a chorus feels like a launch pad into the next one rather than a dead stop. Turnarounds are one of the main places where jazz musicians show their harmonic personality, because the four-chord skeleton can be dressed up dozens of ways without changing the underlying function.

The basic shape: I–vi–ii–V

The workhorse turnaround is built from the tonic, submediant, ii chord, and V chord in a row, giving two bars of steady quarter-note harmonic rhythm that resolve right back to I at the top of the next chorus.

• Cmaj7 – Am7 – Dm7 – G7 (C major)
• Fmaj7 – Dm7 – Gm7 – C7 (F major)
• B♭maj7 – Gm7 – Cm7 – F7 (B♭ major)

You can hear this as a compressed version of a cadence chain: it’s really an extended ii–V–I where the tonic gets pushed one chord earlier so the vi chord can act as a stepping stone back down to ii.

Voiced as simple arpeggios, the four chords in C major look like this:

Sharpening it with secondary dominants and tritone subs

Players almost never leave the vi chord as a plain minor seventh in modern practice. Swapping it for a secondary dominant turns A minor into A7, tightening the pull toward Dm7 the way any V7 pulls to its I:

• Cmaj7 – A7 – Dm7 – G7 (VI7 in place of vi)

From there, the tritone substitute is the next obvious move: replace G7 with D♭7, and the roots now walk down chromatically instead of leaping a fourth. Strayhorn wrote exactly this move into the final cadence of Satin Doll, where A♭m7–D♭7 lands home on C.

• Cmaj7 – Am7 – Dm7 – D♭7 (tritone-subbed V)
• Em7 – E♭7 – Dm7 – D♭7 (fully chromatic descent: iii stands in for I, both dominants tritone-subbed)

Because the turnaround is a framework rather than a fixed rule, this is exactly the kind of spot where chord substitution thrives — diminished passing chords, altered dominants, and borrowed major sevenths from the parallel minor all slot into the same two-bar space.

Tadd Dameron’s chromatic turnaround

One of the most influential reharmonizations in the bebop era is Tadd Dameron’s turnaround from “Lady Bird,” which trades the diatonic vi and ii for major seventh chords built on ♭III, ♭VI, and ♭II:

• Cmaj7 – E♭maj7 – A♭maj7 – D♭maj7

This “Lady Bird” turnaround borrows chords outside the key (modal interchange) and moves in symmetrical thirds rather than fourths and fifths, a sound that later echoes through Coltrane’s own symmetrical harmonic experiments. It shows up as an ending device as often as a mid-form turnaround, and works equally well as a tag repeated over and over to close out a tune.

Arpeggiated, the ♭III–♭VI–♭II major sevenths outline that symmetrical descent in major thirds:

Turnarounds in the blues and in form

In 12-bar blues, the turnaround lives in bars 11–12, most simply as a plain V7 pushing back to bar 1, or dressed up as V7–♭VI7–V7 for extra color. Bebop players reharmonized blues turnarounds aggressively — Charlie Parker’s blues heads routinely substitute a dominant chord over the final bar that isn’t even diatonic to the key, treating the turnaround as a place to insert quick root motion rather than sit still. In AABA standards, the same device closes each A section, and it’s a favorite site for Rhythm Changes tunes, where the bridge and final A both lean on brisk turnaround motion to keep the harmonic rhythm moving.

Voicing the V7–♭VI7–V7 dress-up in C shows the chromatic upper-neighbor motion around the dominant before it resolves back to the tonic at the top of the form:

♫ Listen

• Tadd Dameron Sextet — “Lady Bird” (1948): listen to the last two bars of the form for the Cmaj7–E♭maj7–A♭maj7–D♭maj7 turnaround that gives the tune its name-brand sound.
• Miles Davis — “All Blues” (Kind of Blue, 1959): in every chorus, bars 9–10 carry a V7–♭VI7–V7 move (D7–E♭7–D7) that turns the form back toward the top — easy to track in the rhythm section’s repeated comping figure.
• Charlie Parker — “Billie’s Bounce” (Savoy, 1945): the final bar of each F blues chorus substitutes a dominant chord ahead of the return to F, a compact example of bebop-era turnaround reharmonization.

Related: The ii-V-I Progression, Song Forms in Jazz, Bebop, Satin Doll