Drum’n’bass, the clubland hybrid of recycled reggae bass parts, dance-music technology and impossibly fast beats, that three years ago was just an unwelcome and unfathomable pirate-radio intrusion into the FM waveband, has crossed over into the mainstream. Its big names, Goldie and A Guy Called Gerald, have made critically acclaimed albums, the clatter of jungle percussion rattles through every commercial break, and it has been absorbed into recent releases by long-established acts. Last year, Everything but the Girl resuscitated their career via an infusion of jungle drum patterns, and tomorrow David Bowie releases Little Wonder, the first single off his new, jungle-and drum’n’bass-influenced album, Earthling.

The pretentious television documentary, An Earthling at 50, opened with a series of vox pops of Bowie-literate punters. “A jungle album? David Bowie? That’s ridiculous!” gasped a startled woman; “Sounds like he’s just trying to cater for the latest pop phenomenon,” averred a fat man. A passer-by didn’t know what jungle was. “Let’s hope David Bowie does,” added the interviewer. In a scene that’s already fragmented into a series of incomprehensible subsets – jungle, ambient jungle, drum’n’ bass, intelligent drum’n’bass – confusion is understandable. A rock drummer offered that the difference between jungle and drum’ n’bass was “about 40 beats per minute”, while a drunk Euro-clubber on the Piccadilly Line said she could explain perfectly, but only in German.

But there’s no need to feel ashamed. With his recent album, Guitar, Drums’n’Bass (Avant Records), the veteran British improviser Derek Bailey, who is 67 years old this week, made perhaps the most abrasive retake on the drum’n’bass formulas to date, and still maintains a degree of ignorance.

In a neat, if spartan, flat in Hackney, London, piled high with stock for the experimental-music record label he set up, Incus, Bailey comes over like a cross between Clegg from Last of the Summer Wine and a harsh-but-fair science teacher. And like those dream mechanics who aren’t offended by a customer’s ignorance of the basic principles of internal combustion, Bailey can illuminate the Genesis myths of improvised music without being remotely patronising.

The Sheffield-born guitarist Bailey was part of a triumvirate of musicians, along with bassist Gavin Bryars (now better known as a composer) and drummer Tony Oxley, who virtually invented free improvisation in the mid-1960s. He has collaborated with talents as diverse as the New York saxophonist, John Zorn, the Japanese noise-rock duo Ruins, and the jazz fusion and elevator-music special-ist Pat Metheney, whom Warner Brothers has allowed to record with Bailey on the understanding that he won’t tell anyone about it.

Bailey’s involvement with drum’n’bass, “peripheral at best” he admits, came about via a string of coincidences, wholly in keeping with the studied randomness of improvised music. “I first came across it on local pirate radio, about two or three years ago,” he explains. “I like practising to percussion, so this stuff struck me. But for a long time I didn’t know what it was.” The image of a Hackney pensioner struggling to put a name to a music that was in the ether all around him is both endearing and inspiring. A six-year-old boy in the local newsagents, whose personal stereo reverberated with the sound that fascinated Bailey, proved uncommunicative, but an article in The Times solved his problem. “This sounds like the sort of thing,” he thought, “drum’n’bass.”

A further random element was introduced into Bailey’s experiments via the broken cassette player he used to tape pirate-radio broadcasts. “I thought, ‘This sounds great’, and then I realised it was playing back faster than it was originally.” When Zorn approached Bailey to record a trio of albums with different rhythm sections, including Ruins, and the dub bassist Bill Laswell and the former Miles Davis drummer Tony Williams, Bailey’s accelerated radio bootlegs seemed to offer amazing possibilities. Zorn tracked down the 22-year-old Birmingham drum’n’bass DJ, D J Ninj, and Bailey set about working with a tape he supplied.

“I took Ninj’s tape to Laswell’s studio in New York,” he recalls. “But there were passages of electric piano that I wasn’t interested in and I couldn’t stand the bloody stuff. I gather that that is a recent development. But I thought the drums and bass were real nice. So we took all that out and left spaces. Then we played the whole tape and I just played with it, one take.”

In stripping away Ninj’s embellishments, Bailey re-created the original, simpler drum’n’bass model, but he is worried he may have offended Ninj’s musical ambitions. Tellingly, perhaps, the young DJ hasn’t been in touch since the project. The fusion of Bailey’s ceaselessly inventive guitar playing, from sheets of distortion to clear ringing chimes, and thudding drum’n’bass at its most mini-mal, is a difficult, demanding but ultimately thrilling and utterly unique experience.

For Bailey, the attraction of drum’n’bass was its rawness – “the general bustle, it doesn’t hang about, it moves. But they’re smoothing it out something terrible now” – and its non-musical qualities. “It’s most common to get eight bars and then repeat it, but that isn’t the case in drum’n’bass as I heard it. There were structures, but not logical structures. For me, that was one of its attractions, it wasn’t music. I also liked its ambiguities about the time. If you had a drummer like that, he would never play with a bass player like that. It’s a really fantastic feel. When Ninj did these tracks I tried to relate to them in different ways as regards the time. Sometimes I played with it, sometimes I played against it, sometimes I played nothing to do with it, and other times I was in and out of the time. But you can do that with this stuff and you’re not gonna put anybody off.”

Bailey was also sensitive enough to have certain cultural anxieties about his appropriation of a black music, which one doubts would have struck other artists. “I have to be very careful about how I get into it because you can look very patronising. I’d be quite happy not to do any more of this if the people I was working with weren’t happy with it. It depends on their attitude.”

Bowie’s new single, Little Wonder, which pitches the familiar cockney whine over a furious rhythm track, is the most exciting and invigorating record he’s made for years. His capacity for reinvention over the decades has been staggering, from Thin White Duke to sniffy Panto-Nazi, but will the role of 50-Year-Old Jungle Pioneer, perhaps Bowie’s craziest character yet, have the lasting appeal of Aladdin Sane and the Martian arachnophile Ziggy Stardust? In contrast, Bailey’s use of drum’n’bass could never be suspected of cashing in on a fad.

“Other people are using it as a backing tape,” he says, “but I’m trying to play in the music, trying to be part of the drums and bass. I’m not so interested in trying to use it as just something to play over.”