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PHILADELPHIA - It began as a romantic notion, the kind that emerges from late-night idle talk on the bus: What would happen if the Roots, the preeminent live band in all of hip-hop, held open-house jam sessions to harvest new material?

"The way we were talking at first, it was like going back to the Garden, pre-snake," says Ahmir "?uestlove" Thompson, the drummer of the Philadelphia outfit, recalling the brainstorm that led to weeks of tumultuous, free-form music-making last fall. The sessions, held almost nightly in the band's cramped rehearsal-cum-recording space, kick-started work on "The Tipping Point," the Roots' sixth record, and shaped the album's spare, full-frontal attack.

"We wanted to get back to the attitude we had around "Organix,"' the Roots' 1993 debut, Thompson says. "We all missed that energy of everybody just getting down, being innocent, not caring what happened."

The sessions - with Roots regulars and guests including Jill Scott, Bilal, Vernon Reid and comic Dave Chappelle - brought back that bickering spontaneity almost instantly. In addition to playing up the Roots' diabolical strength - an old-school, groove-tending approach that's nearly a lost art - they shook the veteran collective out of its accustomed mode of record-making.

Like most in hip-hop, the Roots have typically built recordings one layer at a time, assembly-line style. By placing the emphasis on interaction, "The Tipping Point" captures a relentlessly aggressive sound in the spirit of peak-form James Brown.

The Roots, whose influence on hip-hop exceeds their sales, won a Grammy for "You Got Me," featuring Erykah Badu, off of 1999's "Phrenology." Yet looking back, "We had to admit that our last three records ("Phrenology," "Things Fall Apart" (1999) and "Illadelph Halflife" (1996) were made like the "White Album' or "Abbey Road,"' says Thompson, surrounded by molded-plastic keyboards of the space-age '60s, computer gear, and thousands of vinyl records in the studio that is practically his second home.

"I'd do my parts, then give them to Kamal (keyboardist Kamal Gray), who would add keyboards. Then Hub (Leonard 'Hub' Hubbard) would come in and play bass, and on and on. Then Thought (rapper Tariq 'Black Thought' Trotter) would do his thing. That can be efficient, but in terms of inspiration, it's limited.

"Just having all of us around for a while, in the room together, was good. We could see what worked and what didn't more quickly."

Evening festivities started about 10, with the core Roots rhythm section and, usually, guitarist "Captain" Kirk Douglas and percussionist Frankie Knuckles. Somebody would kick around a rhythm pattern, or plunk a chord sequence on the keyboard, and soon an idea would take hold.

Guests drifted in and out: One night, Jill Scott and Bilal were locked in a fiery duet; another night, guitarist Vernon Reid wove skronky textures while vocalist Jaguar ran the show. Musicians and singers working at nearby studios dropped by: After a few minutes watching from the control room, inspiration would hit and they'd slide in, without missing a beat, to relieve someone of an instrument. Guest MCs - among them Dice Raw, J-Live, Jean Grae and Little Brother - jumped in too, trading phrases or short diatribes, engaging in instant battles and call-and-response volleys.

And everybody tripped out when the sound-warping electronic trio Dalek, of Newark, N.J., showed up one night, sending gales of reverberating feedback through the groove.

The Roots engineered the artistic collisions and fostered a tone of supreme whatever-happens looseness in the rehearsal space, which they transformed into a graffiti-walled hangout. A stripper's stage, with mirror and pole, was installed in the lobby, and on select nights the spot was active with entertainers imported from various gentlemen's clubs. ("Chalk it up to band morale," Thompson says, laughing. "As PC as we are, this is still a 'sex, drugs, rock-and-roll' operation.") It was a gathering, a happening, more party than recording session.

Yet there had to be some discipline: After all, the band was looking for usable ideas. It fell to Thompson to navigate that fine line between chaos and discipline.

"We made it clear to everybody that we were looking for songs," Thompson says. "A couple of times I was in the unfamiliar position of having to guide things back on track when the jams got a little too free. Playing traffic cop was definitely a sensitive task. I found myself talking about 'melodic content' and 'easily digestible hooks.' I was saying things I never thought I'd say 10 years ago."

After the jams, captured mostly on computer hard drives, came the enormous task of sifting through the nightly rambles. The band invited several producers to come by and scan the almost 3,000 jam excerpts for moments when the music started to percolate.

"You have to have the patience of Job," says Thompson, who helped assemble a highlight reel. "Each song is like 23 minutes long, and the real moment when it peaks might not come until 17 minutes in."

Trotter, who kept a low profile during the jams, checked out the selected bits. He shunned temperate neo-soul and hip-hop and began to write rhymes to the more agitated beats. His choice, Thompson says, dictated the direction of "The Tipping Point."

"I think (on the previous CDs), the music around him didn't allow him to express all of what was on his mind," Thompson says. "To me, he's more straight-up and vulnerable than he's ever been. Maybe it's the turning-30 thing, but whatever it was, it kicked his (behind)."

"What I liked was when the sound was very raw, unrefined - like unwashed denim," says Trotter. "I'm a street MC and sometimes when things got too pretty, that element could get lost."

The Roots worked up several tracks from the jam tapes, rerecording the instrumental parts that became the apocalyptic "Guns Are Drawn" and a crafty bit of sample-mangling called "Boom." (Not all of the guests turn up on "The Tipping Point.") Then came something totally unexpected: Several of the producers who had popped into the sessions - or, in the case of L.A. producer and longtime Roots collaborator Scott Storch, were sent recordings of them - sent along songs propelled by that same performance energy.

Richard Nichols, the Roots' manager and guiding spirit, says that, for him, that was "The Tipping Point's" tipping point: "It was like the jam mentality continued after the sessions ... It seemed to infect everything." Well, not everything: Some tracks from the ultra-hot Neptunes didn't fit the vibe, Thompson says.

Trotter did some writing and recording away from the band, and by late January the set was finished. That's when the next challenge presented itself: Though its sound is a world away from the band's elaborately arty "Phrenology," and would seem an easier sell, "The Tipping Point" needed support within the executive suites at the Roots' new label, Geffen Records.

At one of the first playback sessions, Jimmy Iovine - head of Interscope Records, Geffen's parent - heard the shakedown song "Don't Say Nuthin'," with its indecipherable, mumbled refrain, and was blown away. Then he heard the rest of the album, and dedicated the label not just to selling the music, but to selling the Roots' whole renegade concept - something no previous executive had ever appreciated.

"It reminded me of the first time Interscope worked on U2," Iovine said recently. "There are things the Roots can do, that they're better at, than anybody else. To me, that means you can't just get a song across, you have to get the whole meaning of the band across."

Thompson and the others, who have heard the lofty pronouncements of industry bigwigs fade into the ether before, say that despite the album's title, they're not simply trying to tip into the mainstream. Having experienced the electricity of on-the-fly creativity, they're more committed than ever to defying expectations, Thompson says.

"I thought "Phrenology' was our rebel record, and also the so-called art record. But as we got into this one, I realized there's this other kind of rebellion the Roots are capable of: It's risky in a different way, because it's so blunt.

"It got easy for us to hide behind weirdness, but this time we're not doing that. We're coming straight at you. We don't want you to be too comfortable."