Adventure Playground is a quartet record under the name of the English reed player John Surman, with Paul Bley on piano, Gary Peacock on bass and Tony Oxley on drums. Recorded in Oslo in September 1991 and released by ECM in 1992, it brings two British and two North American improvisers into one room, and all four write for the date. The result is a dark-toned, patient session in which the drummer's colours keep reshaping the group sound.

Surman plays baritone and soprano saxophones and bass clarinet. The session took place at Rainbow Studio with Jan Erik Kongshaug as engineer, and Manfred Eicher produced. Surman and Bley already knew each other's playing from Bley's ECM quartet with guitar and drums, heard on Fragments (recorded in Oslo in January 1986) and on its follow-up The Paul Bley Quartet. Here the guitar is gone and the rhythm section is new. The same four musicians, in the same month and the same studio, also recorded In The Evenings Out There, which ECM issued in 1993 as ECM 1488 with Bley's name first.

The writing is shared out. Surman contributes four pieces, Bley two, Peacock and Oxley one each, and the set closes with Seven by Carla Bley, a tune the pianist had also played on Fragments. Peacock's Only Yesterday opens the disc in a slow, plaintive mood. Surman's Quadraphonic Question, at over fourteen minutes the longest track, gives his soprano wide space and is one of the places where Oxley is most prominent, while Oxley's own short Just For Now builds quickly to a fierce climax. Bley's Figfoot is a heavy, off-kilter swing carried by the baritone.

Writing for ECM Reviews in 2012, Tyran Grillo heard the album as "an appendix to Paul Bley's previous quartet efforts", now with a different bassist and drummer. He credited the drummer above all, noting that "the added colors of Oxley enhance the music's inner states with endless novelty", and singled out Surman's As If We Knew and Twisted Roots. He also heard Peacock's opening piece as one that feels as much like an ending as a beginning, which suits a record built on open forms rather than set arrangements.

This is the CD edition, ECM 1463 (511 981-2), first released in 1992.