Te necesito, the first of González’ compositions to be recorded by CH, has a very strange introduction - sort of a disco-mariachi feel, but quickly turns into a very melodic vehicle for Leo Vera’s rich voice.

The album ends with En crisis, written by Norberto Shand, a well-known Cuban composer/pianist. It begins with a short and melodic cuerpo featuring some interesting pedal tones in the bass and gradually works its way into the magical charanga groove to provide a powerful conclusion for this historic disc. Each timba group has its own approach to arranging for horns. Issac Delgado, for example, with 2 trumpets, a sax and 2 trombones, frequently sets 2 or more groups of horns off against each other, but CH usually has all 4 horns playing the same rhythm, and sometimes even in unision, an idea which Juan Carlos González says he borrowed from American bands like Earth, Wind & Fire. But in “En crisis” we get a very interesting example of three-part polyphony in the horns. At 2:44 the bass drops out and Sombrilla says “oígame, qué rico, tremenda champola!”. [audio example 23] “Champola” is actually a Cuban slang term for a milkshake, and it’s used in music to describe a section with several exotically overlapping horn parts…blended together, as it were. The parts dovetail together into an NG La Banda-esque unison run at 3:01, and then Sombrilla starts hinting at a coro borrowed from an old Cuban song (“por eso me pica aquí y voy a rascarme allá”) which forms the basis for a number of interesting variations later on. The other main coro idea, "ay que me da, que me da" also sounds very familiar, not because it’s borrowed from the past, but because Bamboleo would borrow its melody and rhyme structure 5 or 6 years later for part of their most famous song, "Yo no me parezco a nadie". [audio example 24] And so, in the Cuban tradition, each generation borrows and develops musical ideas from those before it, supporting once again our premise that Timba is a natural and worthy extension of all the great Cuban music before it. At 3:22, the bass drops out again and the two coro ideas are fused into one - “ay que me da que me da, necesito que me rasque mamá”. (near the end of audio example 23) Up to this point we’ve been hearing a gorgeous melodic bassline from Pedro Pablo’s resonant upright “baby bass”, but when the bass returns, it’s a slap bass! This is actually the synthesizer doubling the bassline, and in later years CH and others would make heavy use of this type of synth patch. The baby bass takes over again 3:44. Pedro Pablo is a marvel - listen to what he plays from 4:37 to 4:43! [audio example 25] Like Paul McCartney of the Beatles and Motown’s James Jamerson, Pedro Pablo Gutiérrez has a true genius for laying down funky, melodic basslines which never get in the way and always seem to succeed in elevating the music to a level which transcends genre.

The track fades out with “por eso me pica aquí”, paying more direct homage to the older coro, and concluding a truly monumental album.