The Ragtime turnaround

[Jean-Michel G]

Very often, bridges or B sections terminate with two bars on the tonic chord before returning to the first bar of the A section (often also a tonic chord). Twelve bar blues also have the “tonic” chord going in the last two bars (although the V7 chord is often played at the end of the last bar).

So in C Major we will have:
|C – – – |- – – – |

To make that more interesting, we can introduce substitutes, like this:
|Em – Am – |Dm – G – |

This is actually the tail of the Circle of Fifths progression in C major: C F Bm7(B5) Em Am Dm G C
In this progression, all the roots progress by descending fifths.

We can now “tonicisize” these chords using secondary dominants. Simply work backwards: G7 tonicizises C, D7 tonicizises G, etc. We get this:
|E7 – A7 – |D7 – G7 – |

Composers of the Common Practice period have all done and used this, particularly the Romantics. Note that, although it leads to C major, this progression itself is in no particular key since none of the dominant seventh chords resolve (except G7). In the Romantic period, blurring the key was a favorite game already!
Nowadays this progression is often called the “Ragtime Turnaround” because of its abundance in that genre. Jazz later inherited it, as did Blues, Rock, Gospel and even Pop.

For a more dramatic effect, you can inject tritone substitutes.
Db7 is the tritone subs of G7 and Eb7 is the tritone subs of A7:
|E7 – Eb7 – |D7 – Db7 – |
The resulting chromatic descent in the bass is particularly effective:

From an improvisation perspective, this turnaround can be a bit of a challenge.
I discussed some of the options in this post.
But on a guitar, there is an easy approach: since going down a fifth is equivalent to going up a fourth, and since the guitar is tuned in fourths, all you have to do is play a motif and repeat it on the adjacent strings (but beware of the B string anomaly!).
Here is a very simple example:

Using substitutes it is even easier since then you only have to slide the motif one fret down each time.

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